#1: First Month
Welcome to my first blog post!
Because I am starting my blog a month after starting my internship, I have to catch you up with what I’ve been working on.
The biggest task I have undertaken so far is digging through a spreadsheet of webform comments. On the bottom of every OneStop page is a yes or no question: “Was this page helpful?” After users choose a response, they are given the option to provide feedback on how to make this page more helpful. Every few months, those responses get exported into a spreadsheet and sorted through. My job has been to sort through them and take notes of the best parts of the page, the worst parts of the page, and everything in between.
As you can imagine, this takes a lot of time. Sorting through thousands of comments is no simple task. But, I am having fun doing it! Being able to see how different users experience the same page is super intriguing. What one user loves might be the favorite of another. The tricky part is weighing those responses against each other and deciding what action to take. That’s what I’ve been working on recently. Right now, I am about to pick an issue or two and develop a plan of how to fix it. This could involve meeting with stakeholders, making lo-fidelity mockups, hosting a focus group, sending out a survey, or any combination of UX best practices.
I’ve also worked on some other things here and there. I’ve updated some broken links on the Office of Classroom Management website, updated graduate and undergraduate program catalogs for the Twin Cities and other campuses, proofread emails, and I’ve been doing a lot of training and learning from my coworkers. I’ve learned so many new technologies already, such as Drupal, Asana, Slack, and ClickUp.
All in all, it’s been a lot of fun so far! Being able to put the skills I’ve learned as a Technical Writing major to the test in a professional environment is very fulfilling, even if I’ve only been doing it for a month.
Thanks for reading, I’ll see you soon!
Key words: webform comments, analysis, editing, users, training