Overview
In the summer of 2019, I interned with YouTube VR at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California. I worked closely with UX researchers, designers, prototypers, and developers while contributing to a major product effort inside the app.
Because I cannot share the original internal design files, this page focuses on the problem, my role, and the product outcome. My main work centered on designing the Movies and Shows experience for YouTube VR, then helping carry it through prototyping, user testing, iteration, review, and handoff into production.
A later in-product screenshot helps ground the internship story in the shipped YouTube VR environment.
Movies and Shows
My primary internship project was designing the Movies and Shows experience for YouTube VR - a premium media browsing and playback surface that needed to feel legible, cinematic, and usable in an immersive environment. I worked through the full design loop with the team: defining UI and UX directions, collaborating with our UX prototyper on interactive mockups, partnering with research to test the designs with users, iterating on the work, and presenting the final direction to YouTube’s broader UX review board.
The final designs were approved, specced, and handed off to development, and the core experience later appeared in the live product. That made the project especially meaningful as an intern: it was not just exploratory work, but a feature direction that survived review and entered production.
Cross-Platform Initiative
Alongside the core VR work, I also explored a broader question: how should Movies and Shows feel coherent across web, mobile, TV, and VR? While this did not become a full internship deliverable, it was an important early lesson in product design beyond a single interface - treating platform-specific UX decisions as part of a larger ecosystem rather than as isolated screens.
These live product views hint at the broader challenge: media browsing in VR needed to feel legible and cinematic, while still fitting within a larger YouTube ecosystem.
Live Product Snapshot
Below are a few screenshots of what the Movies and Shows feature looked like live in the app as of December 2023. I cannot claim the production experience matches my internship designs in every detail, but the core implementation is there, which makes this a useful way to point to the project’s eventual real-world expression.
The shipped implementation is important because it distinguishes the work from purely speculative internship concepting. Even if the final shipped implementation does not match my original designs in every detail, the feature’s presence in the live product reflects a real path from internship contribution to production.
This internship was an early glimpse of the kind of work I still care about most: ambitious product design in emerging platforms, carried through not only as concept work, but through collaboration, testing, and shipment.