A Second Summer at Unboxed

Returning for Round Two

Last summer I came to Unboxed for the first time, where I got the opportunity to work on a project surrounding the UK petitions website, building an AI classifier for the first time, and getting my first taste of professional life. Having come away from that experience, learning more than I ever expected to in such a short space of time, returning to Unboxed for a more extended period of time seemed the perfect place to continue my journey into the workplace, following my second year of university. Over the past 8 weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a new project, working with a multi-national development and design team.

Finding My Feet Again

I spent the first couple of weeks getting resettled and finding my feet again. As always, there was the usual onboarding and IT setup that comes with starting up. Through conversations with Hamed and Ben early on, I was able to get a really good grasp on the project, and understand how my work might fit into everything. This gave me a great understanding of the project before I’d even properly started, which made jumping in a lot less daunting.

Learning the Ropes of UX Testing

Getting up to speed with the project took a bit of time. There was a lot to take in, and the project, and product were ever evolving. Alongside finding my footing in a familiar but still new environment, I was tasked with doing my first ever round of UX scenario testing, working through how the app responds to different situations, and what it actually delivers to a user. It’s a new way of testing, complex by nature and new experience and skill for me.

And a useful reminder that even coming back to a familiar company, there are always new things to learn and pick up.

I also tried to make good use of any spare time I had, exploring things outside of my immediate task list, that I wouldn’t necessarily be inclined to or able to outside such an environment. I looked into the documentation on Web ADK’s, and read a report, shared in the design slack channel regarding the use of AI in design, and what it means to design in the age of AI. My own experience with AI in the workplace up to this point had mostly been from the builder's side, from putting together a basic AI classifier last summer, to leaning on AI tools to help finish my dashboard. Whilst at University, my experience of using AI has mostly been related to structuring assignments etc. So it was interesting to read about it from a design and workflow perspective instead, and see how differently it's being thought about depending on where you sit in a project. This wouldn’t have been the sort of reading I would have sought out myself, but I wanted to make use of the resources available to me, and it was a nice opportunity to see what discussions and thoughts are being had at Unboxed.

From Testing to Designing

Eventually my work shifted from simply running through different UX scenarios, to designing them myself, using the initial set of scenarios as a base to work from, but expanding them, making them more dynamic, to reflect new features and better tailor the scenarios to real use cases. I’d then test the scenarios I had designed, stepping into the shoes of the user I had designed the scenarios for. The shift from simply being a tester to designing the scenarios felt like a real marker in my experience at Unboxed. During this period I also started delving into agentic evaluation, and more specifically agentic AI. In simple terms, Agentic evaluation is about judging not whether an AI agent produces the right final answer, but how it behaves along the way, the decisions it makes and the steps it takes to get there, which matters more once you’re dealing with a system made up of multiple of multiple agents working together rather than a single model giving a single output. I spent time researching agentic evaluation more conceptually, understanding how it differs from more traditional machine learning evaluations which I had learnt at university. I then spent time, more technically exploring as to how agentic evaluation could be incorporated into the multi-agent system and app process.

Life beyond the project & Looking Back

Beyond my work on the project, I really gained an insight into how organisations function, and evolve, particularly whilst going through a fair amount of change. I also got a taste of balancing personal and work life for a more extended period of time, which was a challenging but useful and important learning experience.

Looking back over the past two months, this internship built on what I had learnt last year; that the value of an internship isn’t necessarily just the specific skills that you pick up along the way, but as much how comfortable you get sitting inside a real, evolving workplace, figuring out where you fit in amongst it all.