The Design Diaries: Adventures of Luke Coogan Intern at Workhuman

Hi!! I’m Luke Coogan and I’m a 3^rd year Interaction and User Experience Design student at IADT. I’ve joined the Workhuman design team as a Product Design intern for the past 5 months as part of my college course. Outside of design, I love music, travelling, rock climbing and skateboarding.

I applied to Workhuman because of the company culture. When I learned about their mission to make work more human by recognizing employees in the workplace, my interest was piqued. Since joining, I’ve found that it’s true! I’ve never felt more welcomed in a workplace.

As part of my internship, I have been assigned a parallel project around the tool Spend Management. My role as a designer is to research and identify the current problems that users may be facing with this tool and to create solutions that can provide a better experience. For example, in this project, one of the issues that users were having was that they had many accounts, and it was difficult to manage budgets effectively. Once this issue was identified, my job is then to find ways that I can help the user with this task! This has been an amazing experience for me as I have been given a lot of independence with the project and have even ran my own workshop!

Organizing my own workshop was a fantastic experience. I worked with people in my team from various different backgrounds to come together and brainstorm ways to create a better experience for the people using the product. This was insightful because we came up with a wide range of ideas! From here, it was my responsibility to focus on the key aspects that would address the core issues that the user was experiencing.

I have learned that it is very important to learn how to communicate effectively with your team. As a designer, you’re never designing things for yourself, so it’s crucial to take constructive feedback from your peers and this is something which has been very valuable to me at Workhuman as I am surrounded by many inspiring designers who have given me great advice on projects.

In my course, we are always focused on the reasons why we are designing. You always have to be able to stand behind your work and justify every decision that you have made to show that it has been informed by your research. This is a very important skill to have as a designer and one which has been commonplace in Workhuman, which has been amazing to see.

My experience has been amazing with Workhuman so much so that there’s too many to share!! I’ve really enjoyed the teambuilding and workshops, especially as someone who was new! I have really enjoyed the experience of working on my own project, as well as each of the design feedback sessions I’ve had with my manager. My manager often checked in with me to give me feedback on my work and would always approach his work with a user-centered approach, which was particularly inspiring to me.

My advice for someone considering applying to Workhuman is to go for it!! Workhuman has been an invaluable experience for my career, and I have learned so much from my time here. Even if you find yourself in a different area in the future, I am confident you will come out of the internship with valuable skills!

Once I return to college, I’m planning to hit the ground running this year with my thesis for my final year and work hard until my graduation. After then, I’ll be looking for a job like the ones here at Workhuman! I plan to stay in the same field of UX design and develop my skills and portfolio further, and then who knows! Let's see what the future holds!