• OVERVIEW •

Throughout the summer of 2020, I had the amazing opportunity to intern at Roblox, a software and gaming company with over 150 million MAUs, on the Studio Core team! As part of the Studio Core team, I worked on improving the user-experience of Roblox Studio, the platform game developers use to create games for Roblox. With COVID-19 cases becoming widespread across the US, our 10-week internship program had transition from in-person to remote. Though interning remotely had it's challenges, I'm extremely grateful for my team (especially my mentor Sony and manager Ron) and University Recruiting for working hard to ensure interns were well integrated into the company and had the necessary resources to have a successful time at Roblox.

Roblox 2020 Interns

• STUDIO UX DESIGN TEAM •

Ron Di Sandro (manager), Sony Verma (mentor), Ruofan Zhang, JC Solis, Jiaxin Wen, Jun Wang, Ashley Miao, Me

• ROLE •

My main project this summer was to improve the weekly update experience for users to eliminate user pain points, (i.e. work flow disruption, loss of work, productivity drop), and I did so through extensive user research and close communication with engineering to understand backend limitations. For my solution, I addressed user pain points through optimization of notification use and providing more user control in the update process.

In addition to my main project, I wanted to gain more design experience during my time at Roblox and work on other aspects of the product; so, I picked up 5 additional small-to-medium sized projects during my time interning! I redesigned Studio's chat UI to improve color contrast, visual hierarchy, and layout to enhance accessibility and consistency across the platform, researched use cases and workflows of system-to-user communication to create a new universal notifications system to reduce information clutter and provide UI feedback to users, and created hi-fi mockups for new Studio features.

* Unfortunately, due to confidentiality reasons, I cannot show samples of my work at this time 😞 *

• REFLECTIONS •

Overall, I had a really great experience interning at Roblox this summer! I learned a lot about how to effectively communicate my ideas with my team, have an in-depth rationale for the logic behind my designs, understand user needs, and design with both a short and long-term vision for the product. I really enjoyed working with and learning from the other designers, engineers, and product managers to create solutions and improve Roblox Studio for game developers to continue bringing the world together through play.