Summer internship & work
Svea Solar
Svea Solar is digitalising energy. We have made it our business to shift the planet away from dirty energy towards renewable power
During my internship at SVEA SOLAR I explored many areas of the internal organisation doing UX research, UI design and working with brand assets developing a Design System.
My role
UX/UI Designer
Visual Designer
Tools
- Figma
- Milanote
- Notion
- Salesforce
How might i...
Bridge the gap between the creative department and the engineers by creating a common design language in shape of a Design System?
My goals
- Learn Figma
- Learn how to create a Design System for a website, and knowledge of what it consists of
- Learn how to develop my collaborations skills when designing.
- Learn how to how to document my process each week
- Learn how to allocate and estimate time on prototyping
SVEA SOLAR
Process
How I went about doing my internship and creating value for me and SVEA SOLAR.
week 1-2
Point of departure
Before any project begin I use the Hyper tool “Point of departure“. It’s a tool I use in teams to mutually decide on group culture, how we should work and our common goals. I feel it really sets a good foundation for building effective teams. I was doing the internship on my own but decided to it together with my mentor Frida.
Deep dive into the company
What is important for me when working is to get to know the brand. Who are they whay do they do? Why do they do it?
The internship was remote but I decided to fly down to Stockholm to spend some time at the office.
While there I went through all exisisting Brand material and communication strategy they’ve documented.
Ux research
Now when having more company knowledge. I set up interviews with the employees to get a more in-depth understanding of where challenges and needs.
Insights
Company grown fast in a short amount of time, communication has changed. Clear guidelines are needed to get brand consistency.
Action steps
How might I bridge the gap between the creatives and the engineers?
Week 3-4
What's out there?
I studied design systems by
studying existing Design systems online ex. Google’s open source Material Design, Atlassian design reading books online, listening to podcasts, reading articles and taking online courses at Skillshare and Youtube.
Learn figma & do interface audit
Now I was familiar with the brand and the struggles of the employees I started to explore Figma which was a new program for me.Meanwhile i tried to define all existing element in the website to start somewhere.
Asset Library
Discovering the benefits of using Figma, we decided it was going to be the source of truth of the Design system I started of by creating asset libraries which everyone at the company could access and the goal was to increase fast-prototyping by having drag and dop libraries. Problem was that there were no clear guidelines of how the assets should be used and that was yet to be documented.
Week 5-6
Ui design for a new portal
While exploring Figma and Design System. I helped out the support team to create user interfaces for a new internal data base portal. I focused on making it user-friendly for the support team to access data about the users. Since i was working with the “users” it was easy to iterate on the design.
Using the internal portal to build design system
The designed components together with the gathered information and experimentation in Figma became to shape the foundations of a Design System.
Current stage
The Design System is now in development stage together with developers and designer at Svea. We are working on re- creating all components by using Atomic Design and documenting clear guidelines of how it should be used.
My learning outcomes
- Knowledge in how to create a Design Systems
- Figma
- Notion
- Salesforce
- Learn about the existing communication strategies of Svea Solar
- Prototype an asset library by using the existing Graphic profile / Brand guide
- Iterating by getting feedback from developers
