Traineeship Report

Type: Traineeship Report

Direction: UI/UX Design

Year: 05.2022 - 09.2022

Location: Plazz AG - Software Company (Erfurt, Germany)

Background: I started a four-month trainee program at Plazz AG in May 2022 as a junior product designer. During this time I gained a lot of practical experience, specifically going through and understanding the overall process of application development, enhancing hard and soft skills in UI/UX design, as well as experiencing the actual working environment. This experience is very helpful for people like me who switched to UI/UX from another design discipline. I am more confident in undertaking UI/UX design work by going through this trainee program.

The Design Team

Plazz AG is a B2B company that is engaged in the development of no-coding apps that allow customers to create an application with a content management system (CMS) without programming skills. The two main products - MEA and Polario are oriented in the field of supporting events and managing employees.

The design team at Plazz AG cooperates closely with the development team in the workflow, responsible for delivering conceptual content in advance, creating prototypes, and communicating or reviewing the current implemented content with developers. Designers also join client meetings occasionally to give additional clarification on the product. The following demonstration shows my learning curve during this program.

Learning Curve

Design Tasks

A new feature design - Admin Area

I was assigned the design task of building a preview feature for the app called admin area, allowing users to preview the content‘s details and layouts in the app before it is published. I started the design in iOS and later optimized the interfaces respectively for Android and Web app.

Main interfaces

You can see below the 4 main pages (page of overview area, items list, filtering results of the list items and empty state with no search results in iOS) and the overview of entire pages in iOS, Android, and Web app.

Sketches of the user flow

Variants of the Overview Card

Main pages of the Admin Area

Interfaces in iOS

iOS Prototype

Interfaces in Android

Interfaces in Web App

Cleaned Up and Optimized

Livestream feature in iOS

Multiple File Widgets in iOS

Competitor Analysis

Design System

I also helped the team enhance the design system in Figma by building various new composited components and reworking some old components across iOS, Android, and Web App.

Notification Card

News Widgets & News Header

Admin Area Card & List Entry

Calendar Date Tiles & Event Header

Multiple File Widgets

Brand Style Guidelines

I conceptualized and created brand style guidelines for the company and finished the essential parts so far.

Achievements

Understanding and getting involved with an actual app development company, including its department composition, working agenda, etc.

Understanding the development process of digital products and how a design team can contribute to it.

Working with Scrum Workflow and dividing two weeks into one sprint, where the development team moves the priority tasks in the backlog to the sprint backlog and starts the development process. Both the design team and the development team use Jira to manage all tickets.
Based on the targeted market of the product, the new features developed depend mainly on the customer's requirements.
The design team is responsible for conceptualizing ideas and working on a design for new features two sprints in advance, while needs to discuss with developers the current implemented content.

Hard skills and soft skills in UI/UX design

Designing interfaces for iOS, Android and Website, being familiar with the layout and elements that make up an interface.
Strengthen Figma skills, including building interfaces, composite components and managing design systems (libraries) in Figma.
Enhanced research skills for multiple topics, for example, brand style guidelines, interface design with different layouts and brainstorming for new feature designs.
Communication skills have been strengthened by conducting presentations on different topics and communicating with different departments.
Try to undertake a design task for new functionality in the app independently, which started building interfaces in iOS and later accomplished in Android and Web.
Got involved in discussions with the development team regarding the new feature mentioned above, including presenting the idea to developers, attending refinement meetings and working on detail optimization.