Michael Senkow

apple; accessibility and app concepts

Role: Product Designer (intern)
Company: Apple
Years: 2012; summer


Team make-up: Group of designers situated in a heavy eng-pm area of Apple, guidance from a manager but mostly me wrangling projects on my own with minimal guidance

My first professional experience in UX was with Apple’s IS&T (Information Systems & Technology) UX group, where I focused on developing internal software. During this internship, I engaged in multiple projects, with a primary focus on Accessibility—a passion that continues to influence my design work today.


Working at Apple in Cupertino provided invaluable insights into the professional User Experience environment. Apple's design philosophy, characterized by meticulous attention to detail and a seamless user experience, stood out as unique compared to my later experiences at Microsoft, IBM, and Meta. I also participated in a marketing team challenge centered around app bundles, where my team ranked in the top three.

Early work in the internship was focused around some quick, direct asks that needed wireframe concepts. There are almost always some direct needs in an org: documentation pages that need updating, help that should exist but doesn’t. Here it was a log-in system concept that needed an MVP version of its UI.

This followed the early broad pattern most of my work follows.

Connect with stakeholders. Find the available resources (at this time, Photoshop designs based on a general Apple language that existed in pdf form, and a broad ‘if you make it as images, we can code it’ mentality).

Iterated on a range of variations of what this could look like. Bringing those iterations around to people in the department and around apple to see how they responded. Motion examples of the slider, image examples of different states.

Connecting with development early on to make sure I’m laying out concepts they can be created.

Then presenting and finalizing the results, and tracking them as we moved on to other work to confirm success. (This was an internship so the direct need on this specific part was fairly easy to move through).

Accessibility

The main focus of the internship ended up being a specific focus into Accessibility around the internal tooling.

This meant initially doing a broad audit of just what software existed while also bringing myself up to par with what Accessibility in software fully meant. The group I was in did some attempts at building better empathy for what users with these restrictions go through, and trying to recenter the discussion around "Universal Access” and that accessibility fixes in UX often fix a range of in between states.

An audit focused on near-complete sight loss will also improve overall ease of understanding and movement through an application.

This continued in conjunction with a mixture of prototypes to better understand how to improve certain interactions, research in the field seeing how our customers interacted with apps, and meeting with Accessibility focused leads a Apple.

End results

What was the final result and success story of the internship?

DOCUMENTATION! A ton of it. Four main artefacts (left at IS&T because, Apple) that laid out:

• Recommendations for immediate fixes across a range of tooling of what directly needed changes.

• Examples of a range of coded interactions for improving accessibility in these spaces.

• Recommendations and examples using our tooling of what designers should look out for moving forward.

• An example of some bluesky “This is immediately broken but what if we also added…” to make a login experience more enjoyable.

The login-concept video

Specifically sharing out the example video from the login concept.