Melody Kim

“I had the absolute pleasure of mentoring Melody during her internship this summer at Microsoft. Melody truly rose to the occasion in one of the most difficult and complex product spaces in the software industry and contributed significantly to the future vision of the division in her short time at Microsoft. Melody did an incredible job absorbing and gaining understanding of not only the software development industry, but in absorbing huge amounts of background research, market research, analyst data and years of previous design work to become a proficient and immersed designer within a few weeks of starting. The project Melody was working with me on required her to interact daily with peers who have been leading in their areas for 10-15 years and are all senior, principle and partner level engineers. Her tenacious work ethic and desire to contribute enabled Melody to not only sit at the table with such senior staff, but to actually lead them in design exercises and contribute a variety of design and research data to the group. As her internship continued, I was able to let Melody become more and more autonomous in her work, with the last 4 weeks of her internship being almost completely self-driven, something rarely achieved by any Microsoft Intern. The feedback from my peers during and after her internship concluded were unanimously positive. In the Developer Division Ux group at Microsoft, the most junior design hires are normally required to have 3-5 years of professional industry experience. I would direct hire Melody as a Ux designer at Microsoft in heartbeat. She has the combination of visual design, design thinking, research and entrepreneurial skills that I rarely see in the user experience design world.”

“I worked with Melody during her UX internship at Microsoft, and she impressed me with her proactive approach to the project, her confidence in her ideas and her ability to listen to feedback and adapt her work. Melody was thrown into the deep end on a project with a group of highly opinionated senior team members working on some deeply technical experiences (software diagnostic experiences). She was able to quickly able to get up to speed on the problem we were trying to solve and began contributing effectively almost immediately. She was able to lead the group on some ideating around user experiences and was able to discover key usability issues that we needed to address. Through the project she constantly push us forward by bringing new ideas and designs to the table. As we closed in on some ideas she led a paper-prototyping exercise with users to help drive some more design decisions, and finally ran a series of usability studies with users to fine tune the experience she was driving. She impressed me with he creativity, but even more so with her willingness to hear feedback and walk away from an idea if the feedback indicated the design wasn't the right one. He drive and confidence well balanced with her creativity and flexibility. I highly recommend Melody to any team who needs a great UX partner, especially in a technical space.”