Apple.

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

Role

Product Design

For

Apple News, 3 months

With

Mentors- Ricky Lee Richards, Emmet Smith
Thanks to- Marianne, Gretchen, Kirk, Jay, Natalie, & Paul
Other product managers, editors, and developers.

🔒 Protected by NDA.

Presenting value

By the end of my internship, I was giving daily keynotes to my team during critiques, delivered multiple keynotes during my process to our director, Wyatt Mitchell, and gave my final keynote to VP of design for Services, Robert Kondrk. I left with 3 main takeaways.

Viewers should be able to envision my product fitting seamlessly within the Apple News ecosystem. This meant creating prototypes with perfect visuals and animations.
Time is value. I learned to create concise presentations, <7min long. Thus constantly questioned the value of my designs.
Apple’s design culture also prioritizes intuitive design, which also meant mastering delivery. I practiced scripts until it didn’t feel like I was giving a presentation anymore, but instead telling a story. Finally, I learned differences in presenting to different stakeholders and saved my spec-oriented presentations for development.

Balancing business and technical needs

I learned to strategize my designs to fit business trends of the company and also negotiate with developers based on existing framework. For example, if we knew that Music was going to be releasing shared albums in iOS17, this that Business could be receptive to features that leveraged social interactions and developers already had infrastructure to create similar products.
Talking to Services product managers to understand the business and technical tradeoffs they made. This helped me understand and negotiate constraints when reviewing my designs with development.
After I finished my intern project, my internship was extended two weeks so I could finalize another existing design project for dev hand-offs, allowing me to use m newfound skills . My main task was to mediate between development and business tradeoffs to finalize a design so that it could be launched on time.

“Everything is important, success is in the details”

Apple is known for having the best design, and I joined ready to absorb as much of the talent and mentorship I could from my peers. Sometimes pushing pixels makes all the difference.

I picked up Sketch in the first week, sifting through coworker’s design files and detaching and rebuilding components in the Library.
By the second week, I was giving keynotes to our team with animated screens, and by the end of my 3-month internship, I even picked up a bit of SwiftUI to prototype seamless interactions.
So much of this learning was enabled by the generosity of my mentors, team, and coworkers I’d met through random Slack messages asking for help. I learned how important it is to me to love the people I work with (kind and critical) and that sometimes the best way to learn new tools, pick up new design concepts, or understand development is by making friends.