Self-reflection

Context

To reflect on my internship period, I looked at things that went well and what could have gone better, so that I can be able to grow as a professional.

Results

What went well?

Throughout my internship I was very motivated to deliver high-quality products. The team at Moonly made me feel at home and I really enjoyed working with them.

I feel like each of the 3 main phases of the project (research/design/development) was properly executed due to my motivation and being able to balance the internship project with other internal assignments for other clients. I also learned a lot about new technologies and company methodology.

Before the internship started, I listed the following personal development goals that I wanted to improve on:

• Improve technical knowledge of developing a webshop and e-commerce platforms
  • I had never developed a webshop before, and I feel like this internship helped me understand a lot about how e-commerce platforms work and how I can customize them. Not only from working on the graduation project, but also by helping develop online stores for real clients.
• Be critical of research
  • I wanted to make sure my research is supported by proper sources and research methods. By using multiple research methods and combining research documents for most of my research questions, I have improved the quality of my researching skills.
• Improve UX/UI skills
  • By designing a robust design system in Figma to make my designs and using scalable components, validating these designs with user feedback and creating multiple iterations of a design prototype, I have improved my UX/UI skills a lot during this internship.

I am satisfied with the progress I made on these personal development goals.

Another thing I wanted to improve on was time management. In previous semesters I often encountered issues when deadlines were coming up, forcing me to work longer and harder to meet deadlines. To fix this, I made sure that I had my entire planning laid out in sprints and kept everyone involved up to date with my progress, working hard from the beginning to give myself a head start. This helped me to not have deadline issues and instead have a normal end to my internship.

What could have gone better?

During the first couple of sprints, I noticed that I was ahead of schedule and therefore I had to reshuffle my planning a lot. While this wasn't a direct problem, it meant I had wrongfully estimated the time needed for a lot of tasks.

I also fell really ill near the end of my internship which meant I wasn't able to finish developing a couple of should-have/could-have features in time. This made my prototype less polished and possibly lacking validation from extra user tests that I would have done.

What would I do differently next time?

Next time, I would try to set more accurate time goals for my planning, so that I don't have to reshuffle my planning as much in case something takes shorter or longer than expected.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm glad with how the internship went and enjoyed it a lot. The assignment was fun to work on, I had lots of freedom and different aspects to work on, as well as being able to work for real clients alongside it. I believe that I showed that I can work well in a professional environment.

I would have liked to be able to finish a few more extra features of the prototype and clean up the code so that it truly feels like a polished product.

There are lots of things I learned, mostly technical things such as how Shopify works, how their Hydrogen framework works, and things to think about when designing and building a webshop, but also organizational processes like time tracking, proper planning, and team communication skills.

Learning outcomes

5: Personal Leadership

By reflecting on my experiences and analysing how I can improve as a professional I show that I can pay attention to my own learning ability.