The age of Digital Design: Insight into Interaction Design Traineeship
What’s it like to work with user experience at Business Finland? What does an internship in the world’s happiest country offer? In this blog post, Business Finland’s Digital Interaction Design Trainee Liana Linvik will describe the first few months of her seven-month traineeship. She will shed light on what it’s like to work in a global workplace, what her daily tasks are, and what IxD design is. This blog post is a part of a series of trainee blogs published during the fall.
Blog 14.9.2021
Designing new points of view
I started my internship this summer while applying for school to further my studies in human-technology interaction. I was excited (and nervous) about starting my trainee period in a big organization while working on my master's degree. After becoming acquainted with my workplace and colleagues, however, I realized this was exactly what I needed to be able to grow my skills in the UI/UX design world.
Learning from professionals in different fields and skill levels, I've learned how valuable new points of view are in user experience. You need to be able to see from different perspectives to be able to create and improve a product or service.
It's a great thing to be able to work towards my master's degree and to build my career at the same time.
What is interaction design?
How do you feel when you use a well-designed product or application? How about a poorly-designed one? As designers, our mission is to create the experience, or the feeling, that the user will have when interacting with a certain service or product. Interaction design (IxD in short), more specifically, means designing the interaction between users and services.
Digital interaction design is a new, wide field with visual, technical and psychology elements, which makes it exciting to learn. You can focus on user experience (UX), user interface (UI), digital interaction design (IxD) or something else. All these options mean you can play with both your creative and your logical side.
The project I am currently working with involves redesigning Business Finland's service product. Our goal is to create a dialogue between the customer and the system. My job is to improve the digital user experience at a concrete level, and my daily tasks include things like web development, graphic design, user interviews, and testing.
What makes working at Business Finland cool?
What I find thrilling about working at Business Finland as an IxD Trainee is that I am the first-ever IxD-focused employee in the organization. My job combines different professional fields, such as cognitive science and computer science with graphic design, and I am able to work with so many highly-skilled teams and important stakeholders. I am able to improve my skills and widen my understanding on how everything works together in the business sphere.
I'm also very glad that Business Finland has given me the opportunity to work on my studies while working as a trainee. I'm able to travel to my university in Tampere and work on my thesis when needed and then come back to Business Finland to enjoy my creative and logical playground. It's a great thing to be able to work towards my master's degree and to build my career at the same time.
All in all, seeing the impact my work has on the organization, and knowing that down the line it will also help Finnish companies grow globally, is what truly makes it a memorable experience to work at Business Finland.