Samsung Research Canada
UX Research Internship
Sept 2023 - August 2024
Researcher
⚠️ Limited due to NDA
Summary
I began my journey in UX Research at Samsung Research Canada (SRCA) where I worked in a team of 5 UX Researchers and 12 UX Designers. During my time, our team was tasked with conducting research for our Knox Cloud Solution (KCS) products, strategic research, and more. It was a pivotal time to be part of the team as emerging technology was leading to massive change and innovation. The need for UX expertise was never more prominent.
The NDA limits each project to a brief overview and designs are a quick recreation, not indicative of a final product. If you want to learn more, I'd be happy to elaborate over a call!
What is KCS?
Knox Cloud Solutions (KCS) is Samsung's comprehensive cloud-based platform that gives businesses complete control over their Samsung device ecosystem. It enables IT admins to remotely manage, configure, and secure devices without physical access. Organizations can efficiently handle device deployment, enforce security policies, monitor threats, and customize settings from a centralized dashboard.
Projects
A Brief Overview of My Work
Empowering Enrollment
I was part of a team of 2 researchers conducting continuous, end-to-end user-testing on all B2B products within Knox Suite. This new initiative aimed to give us up-to-date knowledge on all our products, rather than only doing research within the confines of isolated research requests. Our research allowed us to truly understand what our users needed and gave us a foundation to build on for future updates and designs.
Our insights and recommendations helped drive the profile creation re-design of Knox Mobile Enrollment (KME), a solution allowing IT administrators to automatically enroll large numbers of devices into an enterprise's mobile device management (MDM). To read more about the final product I worked on, visit here.
Customer Retention
The state of research at SRCA did not concisely grasp why customers were churning, so I conducted evaluative, descriptive, and generative research to understand our user needs in the post-purchase journey. This included cross-team collaboration with data, product, and sales. My findings were utilized in a customer retention initiative to power long-term user satisfaction.
Galaxy AI & Beyond
Throughout my tenure at Samsung, AI was becoming a prominent topic in the tech space. With that, Samsung released Galaxy AI, and I was tasked with determining B2B use-cases for both Galaxy AI and AI-powered features within KCS. This included conducting user interviews and task analyses, synthesizing data, and producing insights and recommendations on a rolling basis. Each finding allowed leadership to make informed strategic decisions regarding product direction and feature implementation.
Takeaways
Know how and when to advocate for yourself
Advocating for myself and my work was never something I had trouble doing in an academic sense, but in the workplace it can be quite intimidating. My year at Samsung taught me the importance of speaking up even when I’m the youngest or least experienced person in the room. I learned to voice concerns, propose ideas, and ask for clarity without second-guessing myself. Over time, advocating for myself became less about proving something and more about creating open, honest communication with my team. It's a skill I'm still developing, but one that has already helped me grow both professionally and personally.
Understand stakeholders and make them feel heard
Working with other teams so closely helped me understand how to communicate with people from different backgrounds and gain new perspectives on how to solve problems. I really think that getting out of the "UX Bubble" is super important moving forward, especially when designing for business goals, impact, and much more.
Stakeholders are also more likely to feel connected to the work if they are actively involved. For this project, we had our PMs integrated right from the start, leading to the implementation of insight-driven designs and buy-in from company executives.
Photos :)
