In the summer of 2021, I was a UX design intern at Smarttwigs with the Benevv product team and marketing team. Benevv is a brand new social issues app that brings together brands, non-profits, influencers, and individuals all in one place. My primary duties were to create a web version of SaaS tools for stakeholders to manage all the relevant data and events on Benevv.
Practicing the value of social responsibility always matters to organizations to benefit society. However, social issue engagement is a lack of compulsion that there is no outside force forcing an individual to engage in the activity. In addition, some people have doubts about information transparency and accountability for non-profit organizations or charitable activities.
Make fun and engaging way for employees to contribute to social causes and have it celebrated by the company. Make it easy for companies to highlight individual contributions towards making our society.
Benevv solves the problem of social issue engagement by creating a community that’s strictly for companies to showcase their philanthropic efforts.
To make a fluent experience from the portal to data management, we identified and defined the user flow.
My goal is to mainly target the SaaS system design from login to managing events, the layout of information, and interaction design.
To make a fluent experience from the portal to data management, we identified and defined the user flow.
My goal is to mainly target the SaaS system design from login to managing events, the layout of information, and interaction design.
The initial wireframes were very exploratory and came out with several versions since I don’t have much-existing data or content materials. I first decided to create a dashboard that showed all the org information on the home page with a chatbox and ranking features that employees can manage data and discuss with this tool. Then we decided to focus on creating a web app community for companies to showcase their philanthropic efforts so that employee will see what the company have done and join with them.
I learned how to work with a Scrum team to complete a set amount of work in an agile environment. The team used Jira, an agile product software, to track the backlog for individual tickets, which referred to specific tasks. We run a 2-week sprint and assign outstanding issues to everyone to the next sprint when it finishes. We had a product standup meeting every morning to review everyone’s working progress for tickets and blockers they had.
It was challenging for me at first when you received several tickets at one time, especially when you are new to the team, but I learned to prioritize the ticket with its importance level. Each ticket pins on a different section and has a prioritization for the work that matters most to customers. It was easy to keep track of the progress and maintain certain flexibility to add or edit the ticket with the tools.
One of the most valuable skills I gained from my internship is communicating with people in a professional setting. The communication was all under online tools like Google Chat and emails. I worked with cross-functional teams from the product team to the marketing team, also, the discussions with PM, engineers and CEO are different from discussions with peers. Use the proper term to explain your idea efficiently and clearly to help things work effectively.
This internship is a learning experience that asking questions is important. Asking questions creates an opportunity for new understanding and new learning. Sometimes I was hesitant to ask because I was always concerned about being bothersome or the question was too basic. It did not take long for me to understand that my team members and manager were willing to answer. If I wouldn’t ask, they will never know I need help. Asking questions is more straightforward for clarification to prevent misunderstanding or failure.
Importantly, asking effective questions, which means questioning involves a little more thought and care. By questioning a concise and direct question to avoid ambiguity. The team was all lived in different cities and time zone, I tried to make the best effort to stay engaged in the conversation to ask questions that actually help to clear up confusion.