image of Kara at LiveWorx

DESIGN RESEARCH, UX DESIGN

PTC Design Research Internship

CONTEXT

In the summer of 2019, I interned at the PTC Boston office as a design research intern on the Product Design Team. My team focused on informing the design of PTC's myriad of software products that focus on digital transformation. PTC's Suite of software products involve PLM, Augmented Reality, CAD, and ThingWorx an IOT product, which is the product I mainly focused on during my summer.

TEAM

Bill Cole — Director of Research and Academy
Leisa Wert — Senior Director Design Strategy
Kim Moroni — Director of User Research

OUTCOMES

— Created, ran and presented findings from 3 separate studies which amounted to speaking to 20 different users over 24+ hours of user interviews and testing sessions.

— Developed a new standard for recruiting participants to empower the team to quickly respond to evolving research and business needs in the future.

— Researched and explored the design of a more comprehensive documentation system for ThingWorx.

The first image is me presenting to 30+ employees at a design thinking workshop. The next image is of me at the LiveWorx digital transformation conference during a break from user testing sessions at the UX Lab

What I learned:

FOSTER A WIN WIN SCENARIO

I learned to efficiently collaborate with others by being mindful about their goals and think about what I can do to help them achieve that goal through our collaboration.


QUESTIONS ARE KEY

Asking questions is not a sign of weakness. Instead, it is the fastest way to learn and grow.


SEEK CRITIQUE

Being open to suggestions from different perspectives is significant; I learned to make informative decisions and advocate for them with supportive data — whether qualitative or quantitative.

If you are interested in learning more about the work I did at PTC, please send me an email at kadailey@umich.edu and I would be happy to chat more.