3 most valuable takeaways from my UX design internship at Adobe

7 min readJan 26, 2024

This article was initially published on my Substack on 17 August, 2022.

I still can’t forget the glow on my face on one fine morning in February of 2022 when I first saw an Adobe UX design internship offer letter in my inbox.

Now, it seems like that time passed in the blink of an eye. This internship came with fantastic people, a top-notch project, hectic deadlines, and tremendous growth. My only regret is missing out on the office coffee and munchies due to the internship being remote.

Before I begin, I’d like to give a shoutout to my seniors and mentors Bhairavi Singh, Midhun Krishnakumar and Varun Shyam from Adobe to be such excellent supporters throughout this journey. None of this would’ve been possible without their help.

I present to you three of my most valuable takeaways, and I hope these can help you grow too.

Document everything

I’d love to recall a quote by Joan Didion, an American novelist and essayist.

I write to know what I think.

When your brain isn’t busy remembering everything, your brain can then understand anything. When you’re not overwhelmed, you become free to analyse and ask important questions.

Documenting made a vast difference in my day-to-day work life:

It helped me empty my brain onto something so that there’s more space for thinking. This helped me gain clarity in what I was doing then, improved the quality and quantity of the ideas I generated and enriched the discussions I had.
It helped me keep myself in check as it presented me with a map of the journey I had gone through. I reflected back on what worked for me and what didn’t, and that helped me approach the next day better prepared. It helped me ensure no mistake is repeated.
Due to consistently keeping up with it, by the end of the internship I had a single source of truth document. It helped me establish integrity, honesty and authenticity in my work.

Here’s the very basic framework of my documentation process:

I made a Gantt chart in MS Excel to map my progress and plan activities on a weekly basis.
I wrote notes of every standup I had with my mentor, and at the end of each day, I noted what I accomplished.
I used the notebook given by Adobe as a blank canvas to write down pretty much anything I wanted to. It is filed with random notes and ideation sketches.

Now you might say, documenting everything is tedious beyond measure and I’d rather board a Mumbai local at the Kurla station during peak rush hours, and you wouldn’t be wrong. It is difficult to maintain that habit. But imagine a situation where you have to present your work to the stakeholders of the product, but you don’t really know what content to present. Wouldn’t that be even more problematic? Or imagine a scenario where you missed out on a task that was discussed a week earlier or made the same mistake you made three days ago. Would you like to be in that situation?

So document everything.

You were given new tasks at Monday morning standup? Document it.

Finished the day? Document it.

You were really tired and the office coffee machine broke down? Document it. Document everything.

What final design really means

Ever come across a feature displayed as one active screen where everything is just perfect? That is the first indicator of non-realistic work.

Design academics has a bad habit of directing students to make designs as ideal as the male protagonist in a Korean romance drama. Though it is important for it to be that way so that beginners can take the first step, it becomes a hurdle to cross when going into the real world.

I’m guilty of it myself, I used to display finalized designs in a single mockup/flow without realising the constraints that come with it.

Through this internship at Adobe, I learned that ‘finalising’ a design didn’t stop at designing the ideal state. Every design recommendation I made came with at least a logical understanding of how a feature would work in the back end, where the required data from it came from etc. There exist multiple other states along with the ideal state of the interface. Here are a few:

Loading state: Nobody sees this in a perfect world, but not everyone has lightning-speed internet access either. This state should describe what the screen looks like when retrieving content or some action is been performed.
Blank state: What the screen looks like when there is no content to be displayed. Remember the ‘You have no friends’ message facebook showed when you didn’t add anybody as a friend? A perfect example of what not to do on a blank state.
Single state: You have a single (only one!) item of data on the screen
Overflow state: When there are too many results to display (dang it, user!)
Error state: Oopsie, something messed up. This describes what the screen looks like in incorrect situations for the system
Success state: 10 points to Hufflepuff! The user correctly finished a task and now the system has to give a ‘success’ feedback.

Understanding how these states work and will be displayed makes your design real. It reduces the to-and-fro between a designer and an engineer since you’re proactively providing what they need to code your design into the product.

You don’t want to show your I-made-it-cuz-I-liked-it face to your engineer, trust me.

Visualise everything, get feedback, repeat

I heard this as a takeaway from an internship final presentation given by one of my fellow interns. It struck me that I had gone through a very similar situation during my internship.

Brainwriting ideas is usually a great start to begin any high-level ideation, but I’ll always advise visualising your ideas in low fidelity alongside it. Visualise every single idea before you make a decision regarding whether to use or discard it. Use those visualisations to get as much feedback as possible.

Early into the ideation phase, I used to write my ideas down and discuss possibilities of what could happen with my mentor. To illustrate the problem better here’s a situation inspired by real-life events:

Me: Hey mentor! I believe we should go ahead with idea A.

Mentor: Okay, but what about this? And this? And that? And have you thought about this and that? You could also make it this way and that way.

And I was awestruck about why I hadn’t thought of all this before!

I believe even you must have come across this situation where you missed on something that was right under your nose, which you should have picked up on.

Visualising your ideas, even in the smallest fidelity possible (like sketches in the notebook your company gave you when onboarding, yes you have to use it!) helps in many ways:

Helps build the same image in the minds of everybody discussing the idea, helping be on the same page.
Helps build a holistic understanding of what you’re suggesting. It helps clarify what is and what isn’t a part of your design.
Helps people pinpoint and reference parts of your design successfully for suggesting changes, enhancements or ask new questions. This assists people to give actionable feedback rooted in the context of your designs.
Helps you build a rough changelog of your design so that you can easily reference previous versions of your design and present your progress.
Gives a shape and form to your idea. You can see them living with the other features and components on that screen. You might find a lot of shortcomings, alternate use cases and loopholes in your design then and there itself.

And yes, just because you sketched something doesn’t mean it has to go on your portfolio website. Just sayin’!

Conclusion

Being my first internship, this memory will be etched onto my brain for the rest of my life. These 10 short weeks have been enlightening in multiple aspects, and to all my fellow interns reading this, I wish a similar experience to you. I hope my takeaways from Adobe help you in your design journey.

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👋 See you later!

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