Nokia Technologies

At Nokia, I had purpose.

As design coordinator, I was given a variety of responsibilities. My work ranged from simple poster design to creating HTML e-mail templates, designing visual assets of products to creating a fully animated promotional video. I started out by working on maintenance for the product site and quickly found myself completely redesigning the homepage. It was an unbelievably fulfilling first co-op, and I constantly look back in awe of how amazing of an opportunity I had.

A Typical Day in the Office

Some days would begin with meetings, where my team would gather and share updates on work from previous discussions. Usually, one day a week, I would meet with my supervisor to discuss current, previous, and potential projects and establish priorities for myself. Other days, I would come into the office and immediately continue work from the previous day. I would spend a lot of my time ensuring that I am contributing as much as possible to the team and forming several drafts so that I could create the best possible outcome. There were few days where I would spend the entire eight hours of the work day tackling a single solution.

Towards the end of my co-op, I started making more immediate decisions. I had less time to gather feedback, so I used the freedom I was given by my supervisor and my experience in the past to simply do what I believed was most appropriate, efficient, and successful.

Motivations over Time

Two months into my co-op, I was still exploring different possibilities regarding the work I could do for my team. I wasn’t sure yet whether my work would be more graphic design and presentation-based or more website development-oriented. Later in my time there, typical days started to become less uncertain and more focused. My work would consist mainly of long-term projects, whereas a lot of my work at the beginning of my co-op had been short-term and more learning-oriented. Similarly, my motivations had changed from wanting to learn (at the beginning of the co-op) to wanting to apply what I learned to help the team as much as I could.

Becoming closer to the members of my team played a big factor in these motivations - as I no longer was working only for myself, but for so many others around me. Moreover, I heavily enjoyed the work I have done in the past several months, and wanted to continue what I did.

That kind of motivation was unexpected but so completely welcomed, and I found myself incredibly grateful for it.

Challenges and Outcomes

This co-op offered a lot of challenges that caused me to develop skills that proved to be extremely important to me in the future. I got a better understanding of front-end development, as well as a bit of marketing and sales. I also had significant exposure to the health and wearable technology industries and the careful consideration that goes into the products.

During the latter half of my time at Nokia, I was given a huge assignment: re-designing the homepage. This required not only a large amount of time but also endless planning, review, meetings, learning, etc. Re-designing the homepage consisted of creating the wireframe, implementing it with code, and making a new homepage video. There was still a lot for me to learn, at least in terms of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and on top of that, I had to design assets, form a script, and put together an entire video from scratch. In order to accomplish this task, I had to utilize all of the skills I'd been using so far in co-op and further develop a majority of them. Moreover, the task required motivation, drive, and determination to last for the two months it took me to complete it.

Of course, such a great amount of effort could only produce desirable results. I gained a lot of knowledge in website development-- both design-wise and implementation-wise. I developed stronger relationships with my supervisors. I began to better understand several design principles I've been taught in my computer science classes. I learned to plan, ask for feedback, reflect, reform, and repeat until I was confident in what I had.

Reflection

When I first started this co-op, I was a little more reluctant to take risks. I had less confidence in my capabilities so I stuck mainly to what I knew best. Over time, I learned that I could acquire many skills so long as I put my mind and time to it. Given the resources and support I had during my co-op, I was able to accomplish and learn so much that I wouldn't have been able to without the co-op. Thus, I became a more skilled, experienced, and self-aware designer. I left my co-op more confident, capable, and excited for future roles.

---

Bonus: Video!

Below is the last project I had at Nokia. It's a video I made for the redesign of their health technology front page. You can see a video of the full redesign I did here.

I created all of the assets you see in the video-- the phone screens, all of the devices, the graph at the end. I made most of them using Illustrator and edited the video using AfterEffects. Let me know what you think! (Volume warning: It may be a little loud!)