By Amy Deschenes
Each summer, our team hosts three interns from the University of Michigan’s School of Information (UMSI). These interns may be part of the library science or the user experience tracks of the program. The interns work as an online cohort for 35 hours a week for 10 weeks over the summer. Because of the participants’ varied backgrounds and distinct goals, we approach the internship with a “choose your own adventure” mindset. With a little bit of preparation before the interns start, we can determine the best projects for them to work on and the opportunities for collaboration with others in the libraries and in IT. We use Miro for our preparation activities, as well as to help facilitate an internship planning workshop that the interns participate in after their first week.
We have learned from previous intern cohorts that it is best to have a project that the interns can hit the ground running with during their first week. We have done website content migration projects and basic heuristic reviews of websites as these first projects. But the second week of the internship is where the real fun of the “choose-your-own adventure” begins.
To make the internship engaging and interesting for each participant, our team creates a project idea and backlog board in January before we have even interviewed internship participants. To populate the backlog, we take several actions:
- Review research studies we’ve done in the last year that have suggested follow-up research opportunities: for example, ideation sessions which produced an idea of a dedicated article search that we’d like to prototype and test.
- Review development and enhancement projects related to discovery and digital collections that are scheduled for the fall to identify research opportunities that could inform design and development choices.
- Solicit ideas from staff who have brought us project ideas in the past for UX research studies, discovery improvements, or digital collections enhancements.
There is a team of 3 to 4 staff members who work to gather these project ideas for the internship. After we’ve gathered this information, we put all of the ideas on a Miro board to review as a team. We cluster ideas together and determine which of them could become intern projects. We may also give them a rating of small or large.
This list becomes our internship project backlog. Our internship project backlog for 2023 contained ideas such as:
- ArcLight accessibility testing
- Usability testing of information literacy online class
- Staff interviews about using AI for cataloging
- Google Maps for Widener Library
- Evaluation of online exhibit tools
- Knowledge panel prototype testing
- Clustered records prototype testing
- Usability testing of Geospatial Library website
During the first week of their internship, the three interns learned about our team and and our methods, and reviewed recently completed projects in our research repository. We meet with them individually and as a team to start to understand their interests and goals for the internship. They also start on a pre-planned project where they can begin executing immediately. The other projects, in the backlog, usually need some amount of project planning and discovery before the interns can begin executing.
To facilitate which interns will work on which project, we have a structured 90-minute planning meeting. We bring together our project backlog along with a list of skills, UX methods, and experiences on a Miro board. We start the session by reviewing the projects and skills lists. Then, each intern has their area on the board where they can work alone to copy and drag in the post-its with the projects they’re interested in working on and the skills they’re interested in building. They are also welcome to add their own project and skills Post-it notes based on what they’ve learned in the first week and their own goals for the internship.
Once each intern worked to build their interest board, we have a group discussion about which projects spark each intern’s interest and the kinds of roles they want to play. Some projects might have interest from everyone, so they become team projects. Others may have interest from only one intern and so become solo projects. However, solo projects often get support from the other interns in the form of editing or planning help.
You can review the 2023 UMSI Intern Planning Board for more details. The “Ideation Station” is what we prepared before the session and the post-its under each of the interns’ names are the projects and skills that they were interested in working on. You’ll also notice we have post-its with ideas for the types of staff they’d be interested in connecting with for informational interviews.
After this meeting, our team has a good idea of what the interns will work on over the next 8 weeks, but we remain flexible. Sometimes the interns start a project but are unable to complete it because of timing. And other times the interns finish up work on major projects and we need to add another project at the end of the internship. Often we might end up using a mixed methods study to “stretch” a UX research project.
Through a structured and collaborative approach, our internship program ensures that interns have a comprehensive understanding of our team, methods, and ongoing projects. While some projects become team efforts, others are pursued individually with support from fellow interns. The team preparation and ideation workshop approach has consistently resulted in satisfied interns and impactful projects.
Would you like to learn more about what our interns did this year? Check out their final presentation.