I have been an intern at Visma as a part of the third year of my Bachelor studies in Interaction Design at Malmö University. I have my background in the photography business and have been running my own company for 16 years, taking pictures for magazines, newspapers and companies. After I had had my own exhibition in New York in 2016, I felt it was time for something new, and not long after that, I began studying Interaction Design, which later on took me to my internship at Visma in September 2018.
Why I applied
What attracted me to apply for an internship at Visma was to learn about a completely new domain of business software, and doing so in a design project manner. Something that I had heard that previous interns from my program had done before me. At Visma you do research for about 4 weeks, design for 8 weeks and evaluate your design during a period of 4 weeks. At the end of my project I also ended up doing shorter iterative versions of this process.
My project with EasyCruit
When planning my internship I was presented with a couple of different projects to choose from, and I ended up choosing to work with the recruitment solution, EasyCruit. My project aim was to look at how you could improve communication between the company manager and applicants during the recruitment process within EasyCruit. I also aimed to look into the possibility of implementing new ways for communication, such as social media, in the recruitment process, and whether that could be relevant in improving communication.
I started my project by reading up on the previous research done on EasyCruit, both by their UX Designer Sandra Skogum, and by the previous intern (now hired UX Designer) Sebastian Nilsson. Starting out from their results, I continued my research with support from my supervisor, UX Architect Johan Strandell. I did interviews with people that had different views and inputs on recruitment; such as managers, HR-managers, HR-administrators, HR-project leaders, HR-consultants, and also one employment officer at Arbetsförmedlingen. I also wanted to know more about candidate experiences going through recruitment processes, so therefore I also interviewed newly recruited job seekers, students and career switchers.
Through analysing these interviews I gained a lot of insights and created a new design brief with project objectives, key personas, key scenarios and key principles to have in mind when designing solutions. One of the most important things I discovered through my research was that the main issue is not the communication channel itself, it is instead more important to create design solutions that will push and support those who are responsible for the recruitment process to communicate within EasyCruit in the right way at the right time during the process. My main focus then became to designing solutions to support this insight; creating prototypes and testing and iterating on them.
Why you should do an internship
Throughout my whole time as an intern at Visma it has been great to have the friendly and generous support of all the UX Designers at the Malmö office. I also had the opportunity to have weekly meetings with Sandra. But what has maybe been most important for me is the everyday presence of my supervisor Johan Strandell who has been like a UX-Yoda figure guiding me, informing me, questioning my choices and supporting me trying to find the “right” design. What the “right” design is, is not an easy thing to figure out, or as Johan kept saying: ‘It depends…’
So if you are a student, why should you do an internship at Visma? I think it’s a great way of putting your previous learnings into practice in a corporate environment, to learn to make design choices for real products and real users that are in need of great solutions, and last but not least, to have the opportunity to work side by side with very experienced designers.
