My First Internship at The Home Depot

Over the summer of 2020, I interned with the Data & Analytics department at The Home Depot (my first internship!). I was the sole UX designer on a team with three other software engineering interns (SWE) tasked with redesigning a sales analytics tool.

Despite not being able to share specific details about the product, I want to share how I addressed each of the challenges that the team faced and the processes we went through. To ensure we were solving the right problem, we used the Double Diamond design process model, which involves four phases: discover, define, design, and deliver. This process is the standard design process used at The Home Depot. The discover and define phases involve research into the problem and ends with problem definition. Design and deliver is where potential solutions are explored that lead to converging on a final solution.

Discover: Exploring & Contextualizing the Problem

The Discover phase consists of learning about the problem space and the users. Since our stakeholders are the primary users of the tool and we wanted to keep our users at the center, the engineering interns and I kicked off the project with an initial stakeholder meeting to go over a high-level discussion of the product, the problem, and the goals. As a result, we gained a lot of insight into the problem we needed to solve, but it also gave rise to even more questions. To organize our thoughts, I led a meeting so that we could determine what we knew about the product and what we did not know about the product (in the form of questions).

With the questions we generated, I moderated 4 interviews with our users to obtain a deeper understanding of a typical user’s current-day process and identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. I invited the engineering interns to participate as notetakers, which helped create empathy for our users across the team. During this time, the engineers worked on a technical discovery, which resulted in the decision to re-platform the tool to be more in line with the company standard of cloud services.

Prioritizing the Pain Points

I presented my findings to the stakeholders in the form of pain points so that we could prioritize them in a 2x2 exercise. During this exercise, each pain point was placed onto one of four quadrants based on the business value and ease of implementation for the developers. 

The themes for the prioritized pain points included slow system performance, overwhelming data visualization, and long onboarding time for first-time users.

Deliver: Testing the Solution

The purpose of the Deliver phase is to test the solution before it is launched. The three features helped simplify the interface immensely and reduce cognitive load. I used the low-fidelity wireframe from the design studio to create a high-fidelity prototype in Sketch. The prototype decluttered the interface of the tool and eliminated ambiguous elements. To reiterate, the final prototype cannot be shared as it is proprietary to The Home Depot.

I took the prototype into usability testing to get feedback on any changes to make and most importantly, to see what our users thought about it in comparison to the current experience. Users enjoyed the intuitive experience that the prototype provided, and they appreciated the cleaner interface. On average, users rated the collective experience as a 4.75/5 on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being poor and 5 being great. 

Iteration: Addressing Long Onboarding Time

For the next iteration of the product, we attended to the third pain point: long onboarding time for first-time users. This concerned an entirely separate part of the tool that had multiple tabs with repetitive information. I concluded that the information architecture was the main issue for this section of the tool, so I began my research by holding remote card sorting sessions. Using Trello, a Kanban-style tool, I wrote out all of the elements on the screens onto digital cards and asked participants to sort the information into the tabs that they think fit best. To ensure that we accounted for first-time users, I held sessions with users of the tool, UX designers, and software engineers from other departments.

To synthesize the results, my mentor and I sorted the cards for each participant into the tabs that they chose. We narrowed down what users would expect to see based on how frequently a card was sorted into a tab.

Then, I built low-fidelity wireframes using the card sort results. I was able to reduce the number of tabs on the interface and placed much of the data onto a single screen. To test the wireframe ideas, I conducted concept tests with the stakeholders. Overall, the stakeholders liked the idea of combining several tabs onto one screen and making the information more concise. 

 What I Learned

• Designers need to know how to communicate to various audiences, whether it be users, engineers, or business stakeholders

  At the conclusion of the internship, my team and I presented our work to our Vice President of Technology, Chief Financial Officer of Technology, and Senior Director of User Experience. It was important to cater each presentation to each audience and understand what information would resonate with them.

• Seek feedback often

  I learned to consistently elevate the quality of my designs by asking for feedback from peers, other designers, and stakeholders through design critiques and presentations. It was an immense growth experience to thoroughly explain my design choices and receive feedback on what could be improved.

• Facilitation skills and leading meetings

  I had no prior experience with leading meetings, interviews, or design studios prior to this internship, and every activity I led felt out of my comfort zone at the beginning. Having multiple opportunities to lead activities gave me confidence as I learned how to guide open conversations and ensure that we stay on track.