BoligPortal Internship - Award-winning Internship

My BoligPortal Internship

Topic

I spent first 10 weeks of 2020 in BoligPortal – Denmark’s largest platform with housing rentals. Read now, what made this Internship an award-winning internship!

Timeframe

January – March 2020

Keywords

UX/UI Design, Internship, BoligPortal

Introduction

I wonder if there could have been a better start to my career than an award-winning Internship at BoligPortal – danish based company owning platform with housing rentals for Denmark and Sweden.

My main goal for the internship was to get hands-on experience and improve my skills. Well, that did happen. And something more did. I found a perfect workplace. You just know that’s it’s the right place and job for you when you get up every morning excited to work.

At BoligPortal I haven’t improved my skills only but I became better myself at working within a collective which I have been struggling a bit before.

Learning objectives

Getting my first job in UX/UI field made me really excited, yet very confused. I could imagine that working in the field is way different than studying and working on school projects. Therefore, I wanted to learn as much as possible during those 10 weeks so I set up some learning goals I wanted to work on during the Internship.

  • Manage and maintain the design of digital user experience
  • Be able to evaluate and apply the right user-centered methods in the digital design process
  • Achieve greater experience in testing on real users, analysing results and improving products
  • Get an understanding of how I can professionally handover tasks and prototypes to developers and how to collaborate with them
  • Get to know workflow in a professional company working on an existing product.

Looking at the leaning goals from a different point of view, you can see that together they form a kind of process.

My learnings

During the internship, I got to work on more than 15 projects, participated in a countless amount of meetings, and attended other events with my colleagues. Everything has learned me something. Projects helped me to improve my hard skills and working in a team soft skills like communication or teamwork. 

Concept is more important than a pixel-perfect design

Often it’s better to present ideas and ask for feedback before you move to create the final design. It prevents you from repeating the same step of your process over and over again. If a solution you create is not good enough, it’s better to realise it during the wireframing phase rather than before handing it to developers. The pixel-perfect design has a zero impact unless the solution is thought-through.  

Ask questions

Understanding a problem/task from the very beginning is an essential thing. If the problem is understood differently, the solution is most likely going to fail – until you receive feedback and start working on it again. 

Not everything can be developed

Before my Internship I didn’t realise how hard it might be to develop some features. Everything seemed possible for me. Which technically is, from the developer point of view, but I have never really looked at projects from the project management point of view.

During the internship I also learned to evaluate what’s possible to develop and not considering many aspects and not just my point of view.

Working with different departments

One of the things I wanted to learn the most in a company was the cooperation between designers and developers. I could imagine communication here is crucial. And it turned out to be true. With some projects, I spent more time talking to the devs than creating the actual project. From planning the structure, discussing the possibilities, developing the solution to testing the solution.

Besides working with devs I also tried working with the marketing team on an email campaign. Diving into the email services showed me how one is limited by their software and challenged me to create something cool, yet really simple.

It was more exciting than I imagined

Working on a school project, staying up until 3 am with your study group is exciting, yes. But working on a real product and creating benefits for users is far, far more exciting. 

The journey continues

I kept one small dream for a while way before my internship – I wanted to get hired and continue improving myself. During one of our 1 on 1 talks with my mentor Frederik I mentioned my interest in working here further as I thought the internship went way better than expected.

I was surprised and very happy when he said he also had this idea and is interested in keeping me in the company. I finished my Internship on Friday the 13th of March 2020. On Monday, the 16th of March 2020 I had my first “real” day at work.

Internship of the year award

Amazed by my colleagues, workplace, and the whole internship, I decided to nominate BoligPortal for this award organised by Business Academy Aarhus.

Each year, there are around 2000 students from the Academy having an Internship in different companies across the world. It was my pleasure to nominate BoligPortal for everything they did for me during the internship.

The process was easy – first I filled in an application form introducing the company, internship, and my tasks and reflections. A few weeks later, in the final round, I was presenting in front of the jury among four other finalists. After each of us presented their companies, I received great news – BoligPortal became the best Internship company of 2020.