UX Design Intern - Summer 2022

 

As a UX Design intern, you will collaborate with UX Design professionals to design and enhance user-experiences across Norfolk Southern. In a team environment, you will proactively research and identify customers’ needs early in the design process in order to produce and iterate intuitive and user-centered design solutions.

In addition to knowledge of user-experience fundamentals, the UX Design intern should also possess non-technical abilities such as communication skills, critical thinking, ability to conceptualize a design, and openness to being taught and critiqued. UX Design, at its core, is based on empathizing with users, teammates, and management in order to bridge the needs of all stakeholders, resulting in innovative user-centered experiences and increased ROI.   

UX Design adds a lot to the strategy and process of change management, as both spaces are focused on people and critical for solution adoption. Alongside the OCM team, UX Designers are involved in projects from day one and can integrate with either Agile or Waterfall. UX Designers assist with involvement in stakeholder and user conversations. Working in parallel, UX design integrates with OCM by ensuring solutions are what the user needs, wants, and that their problems are efficiently solved. 

 

The UX Design intern will participate in user research, examining common needs and pain points to fully understand users, add context to projects, comprehend the problem-at-hand, and propose user-centered solutions. After collecting quantitative and qualitative data, UX Design collaborates with project teams to promote empathy of users and their pain points, outline the intended user experience and process workflow, effectively communicate design rationale, as well as present other deliverables related to the user-centered design process (user flows, sitemaps, wireframes, prototypes, etc.). Alongside Technical UAT, UX Designers observe end-users interacting with the product to pinpoint successes and areas for improvement.

 

To work in parallel with the Agile team, UX Designers should be embedded in meetings such as release planning, stand-up, retro, and other meetings where UX might be discussed or add value. UX Designers should be involved from the beginning to be able to understand the requirements, collaborate in the creation of user stories, identify assumptions about user behavior, involve user research and usability tests to build empathy for users, and determine how user workflows and features should work.