Samsung Electronics
UX design internship
01
At a Glance
I kicked off 2024 as a UX Design intern at Samsung R&D office in Vancouver, Canada, designing for the B2B Mobile Experience division. At that time, the UX design team began a revamp of their design system and was releasing a new integrated solution, Knox Manage Lite (KM Lite). It was an exciting time to join the team as I shortly began working on Knox Design System 2.0 and was a part of the KM Lite team, working on their initial releases.
interfaces
Desktop, Samsung Galaxy series
Timeline
8 months
tools
Figma, UserTesting, Google Analytics
Bowls of instant ramen consumed
38 bowls
02
Introducing Samsung Knox Cloud Solutions (KCS)
Samsung Knox Cloud Solutions provides businesses with a centralized platform to manage, configure, and secure Samsung devices remotely. This cloud-based suite streamlines device deployment, management, customization, and protection. IT administrators can easily set up devices, enforce security policies, and monitor threats without needing physical access to the devices.
From a UX standpoint, Knox Cloud Solutions is designed to reduce complexity for both administrators and end-users, ensuring a seamless experience that integrates security with intuitive management tools.
03
Design system
Starting my first week at Samsung, I was tasked to design a time-picker component. Having to present my findings and initial iterations within a week, I used this opportunity to explore the suite of products, mimic the workflows of an IT admin (our users), and ask (too many) questions to my fellow designers.
This would be the beginning of a 6-month journey of creating 5 components and 3 design patterns. The workflow consisted of collaborating with other designers to synthesize research, integrating our findings and customizing it for our own systems, documenting its usage and use cases for other designers to reference, and weekly feedback sessions to present use cases and ask questions. We worked closely with engineers to transition our Figma components to Storybook components and mitigate any implementation issues.
Please reach out if you want to learn more about the components and patterns I’ve worked on!
04
Knox Manage Lite
Midway through my internship, I was asked to join the Knox Manage (KM) team focusing on designing the new service, KM Lite. What differs between KM Original and KM Lite is that Lite is integrated into Knox Portal and lives with the other suite of services; whereas, KM Original was a sole console.
The design sprints for KM Lite were focused on transitioning features from Original to Lite and introducing new abilities that streamlined the complex workflows of IT admins. We also took this opportunity to re-evaluate the existing interactions from Original and ensure Lite’s patterns and components were consistent with the new Knox Design System and the suite of services in Knox Portal.
Due to signing an NDA, I can’t go in-depth about the work in my portfolio, but please reach out if you’re interested in hearing how we tackled 60 design tickets in 3-weeks (various t-shirt sizes). Then, followed it up by winning two prestigious UX awards, the Red Dot Design Awards (Brands & Communication Design, 2024) and the UX Design Awards (Product, 2024).
05
Knox Manage companion app
One of my requests coming into Samsung was to design for mobile. Thankfully, my manager proactively included me on projects with senior designers to revamp internal mobile tools and apps that were used by Samsung IT admins.
As I wrapped up the design sprint for KM Lite (the project mentioned above), the PMs and designers allowed me to lead the design of the KM companion app, which would replace the current KM Lite in the Google Play Store. Without hesitation, I took on the project knowing that I’d practiced designing with OneUI‘s design system from previous projects at Samsung and had mobile design experience from my past internship at FORM Swim.
Due to signing an NDA, I can’t display my work on my portfolio, but please reach out if you’re interested in my process, designs, and the learnings that came out of leading an extensive project.
06
Key Takeaways
If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.
It's safe to say I was never in the wrong room. Being able to collaborate with and ask alot of questions to the 12 UX designers and the 5 UX researchers allowed me to learn and pick the brains of the brightest and best UX practioners. Seeing the process and analzying the questions they ask during meetings, user testing, and feedback sessions has taught me why surrounding youself with smarter people is important to growth and gaining new persepctive.
Industry best practices might not suit your processes and systems.
Initially, while researching various components for our new design system, I thought that replicating from popularized design system was sufficient in showcasing my findings. But, I failed to understand the importance of synthesizing my research and solely using it for reference. Our use cases differed from the enterprises that were producing and publishing their design systems. This taught me to frequently practice design ethnography and showcase our progress with our user groups.
