Over the last two months, I’ve been working at Matchstick Creative as a User Experience intern. I am looking to change my career to a User Researcher role as the human element of design has always appealed most to me. In order to gain the necessary experience in this field, I decided it would be important to gain some real-life experience. 

So, why Matchstick Creative?

Matchstick Creative stood out to me as a place I would enjoy working, not just because they operated in the field that interested me, but because of their strong ethical principles. They love to work with organisations who are trying to do good in the world.  

Why an internship?

I was hoping to gain experience in a User Experience environment which would both provide more clarity in this sector, gain contacts within this field and make myself more employable by adding relevant experience to my CV. 

What did I get up to?

During my time at Matchstick Creative, I have been involved in a range of different projects including participating in workshops, creating surveys and customer journey mapping.

Workshops

I began working with Matchstick Creative when I participated in a workshop designed to help a client establish their main drivers, challenges, understand who their audience is and establish how their audience would interact with their product. This was extremely useful for me as it provided me with an insight into Matchstick Creative’s methods of working and introduced me to the team in a way I could get involved straight away. I also feel that I was able to add value to both the team and the client by providing a fresh perspective to their product.

Surveys

The next project that I was able to help with, aimed to provide a client with an insight into the users interacting with their service. My role in this project was to help create a survey that would later be sent out via the clients social media channels. This project helped me to witness some of the considerations that go into a piece of research like this and I also feel that I was able to add value to the team by taking some of the burden off some of the more senior members of staff and providing opinions about the content of the survey.

Improving processes

During the final major project, I was able to collaborate with Matchstick Creative’s Business Lead to analyse their existing workshop process. We created customer journey maps designed to find opportunities for improvement in this process. This project was by far the most eye-opening for me as it introduced me to completely new methods of research like customer journey maps and creating a process flow chart. This work will make the process for creating and conducting client workshops smoother and added value to both Matchstick Creative and prospective clients.

Overall, this experience has been a fantastic learning experience for me and given me the hands-on experience I need to be more employable when I look for a new job.

Advice for looking for your own placement

The advice I would give to anyone in my position in the future would be to:

• Understand that your role within the company is to help lighten the workload of other members of the team whilst learning as much as possible
  
• Get involved in discussions as you might be able to contribute fresh perspectives to problems and, in my opinion, it is the best way to learn
  
• Enjoy it! The guys at Matchstick Creative are great! Get involved in banter, laugh and joke