Municipality of Amsterdam
Simplifying complex work processes
UX Design
UX Research
Enterprise UX
Internship
Overview
During a 5 month internship at the Design & UX department at the Municipality of Amsterdam, I worked as a Junior UX Designer and Researcher within a multidisciplinary development team operating under the Agile SAFe framework. The internship spanned multiple projects, each focused on improving the usability and accessibility of digital tools used daily by thousands of Amsterdam city employees.
Across the internship I conducted usability tests, performed WCAG accessibility audits, designed improvements to complex internal processes, built a design system from scratch, and presented findings to multidisciplinary teams including developers, product owners, project managers, and senior stakeholders.
Due to the confidential nature of the municipality’s internal systems, the work cannot be shown publicly. For further details, feel free to email me at tyneisha@live.nl.
My Role
Responsibilities
Team
Duration
My Role & Responsibilities
Conducting usability tests and writing test scripts to gather insights into the user-friendliness of internal applications.
Performing UX expert reviews of internal tools and websites across desktop and mobile.
Carrying out WCAG accessibility audits based on the A11Y checklist, including code inspection.
Writing accessibility reports and recommendations for multidisciplinary teams and external vendors.
Designing improvements to internal processes and interfaces within the constraints of existing design systems.
Presenting research findings and UX insights to project leads, development teams, and senior stakeholders.
Contributing to the development of a design system for an internal website.
Working as part of an Agile SAFe development team.
The Projects
During the internship I worked across multiple distinct projects, often simultaneously. Each one involved a different product, a different team, and a different set of constraints, which meant adapting quickly and managing multiple workstreams at the same time.
The first project involved the search functionality of the municipality’s internal intranet. The existing search tool only searched within a user’s own department, rather than across the organisation, causing frustration for teams that regularly needed information from other departments. My role was to contribute design critique, develop a new variant to support my feedback, conduct usability tests with internal employees, and translate the findings into an improved design.
The second project involved the parental leave request flow within an internal HR platform. My role was to redesign the overview screen and detail pages for this process, working within the constraints of the existing HR platform design system, and to present the improved screens to the development team.
The third and fourth projects ran in parallel and involved a new recruitment matching tool and a public-facing job vacancies website. My role was to carry out expert reviews and full WCAG accessibility audits on both products, compile the findings into a structured report, and present recommendations to the recruitment team and external vendors.
A fifth, self-directed project ran across the final weeks of the internship: building a design system for the internal intranet from scratch, to enable more consistent and efficient design work in the future.
UX Research
The usability testing process for the internal search tool was the most extensive piece of research I carried out during the internship. I joined the project at the planning stage and contributed to shaping the test approach from the beginning.
I developed the usability test script over two rounds of feedback with the UX researcher and content specialists on the team, revising it both times before it was approved. I then recruited between eight internal employees as participants, reaching out across different buildings and departments to ensure a diverse group. During the test sessions I conducted five of the tests myself, using LookBack to record and capture observations. For the sessions I did not lead, I was responsible for taking notes and asking follow-up questions after each task.
After the sessions, I processed all notes and transcripts into a structured report per participant and an overall concluding report. I then built a Miro board to map the pain points per participant visually, which made it easier to identify patterns and prioritise the most significant issues.
For the recruitment tool, I also developed a usability test script covering both the tool itself and the job vacancies website, which was included in the final report delivered to the client team.
UX Design
The parental leave project required working entirely within the constraints of an existing design system and a third-party platform.
I began by going through the existing screens as if I were a parent with no prior knowledge of how parental leave worked, noting where the flow broke down and where the language was unclear. I also reviewed a document of feedback collected from real users over previous years, and attended a live test session with back-office colleagues and the customer service team to understand the most common complaints directly from the people who dealt with them every day.
After developing new screen designs and iterating on them through collaborative sessions with the senior UX designer, I worked independently to refine all the detail pages within the parental leave flow. This included rewriting the UX copy and reorganising the information hierarchy within the forms to make the choices feel more intuitive. I then presented the final screens to the development team with clear reasoning behind each change.
Accessibility
Accessibility auditing became one of the most substantive parts of my internship, particularly for the recruitment tool and the job vacancies website.
For the recruitment tool, I worked through the A11Y checklist systematically across every section of the product, inspecting underlying code to verify whether accessibility requirements were technically met rather than relying on visual inspection alone.
For the job vacancies website, I conducted both a UX expert review and a full WCAG audit across desktop and mobile versions. Because mobile introduces different accessibility dependencies than desktop.
I presented the findings in two sessions: once to the recruitment team and key stakeholders, and once independently to a broader internal team. Both sessions were well received. Within one week of the presentation on the job vacancies website, several of my recommendations had already been implemented on the live site.
One of the changes addressed a form that allowed users to submit a job alert without entering a valid email address, a bug the project lead had not been aware of. Another change removed the autoplay behaviour from the hero video and added a play and pause button in its place.
Working within a Development Team
Throughout the internship I was integrated in a development team using the Agile SAFe framework. This meant attending quarterly planning events, contributing to sprint cycles, and working to timelines driven by the team rather than by individual project pace. It also meant understanding the boundaries of what was technically feasible within each platform, and designing within those constraints rather than around them.
Towards the end of the internship I began building a design system for the internal intranet independently alongside my other project work. There was no existing design system for the platform, which meant designers had to make individual decisions each time they worked on a new page, leading to inconsistency. I began with desk research into established design systems, including those from Google, IBM, Apple and the Municipality of Amsterdam itself, before developing components and page templates in Figma. The work included building out a color palette, button components, and page templates that future designers could use as a foundation.
Credits
Concluding Thoughts
The internship gave me a much clearer sense of what enterprise UX looks like in practice. Working on internal government products means the users are often dealing with complex regulations, tight workflows, and systems they have no choice but to use. That raises the stakes for getting the design right.
I grew considerably in my ability to identify and articulate usability and accessibility problems with theoretical grounding, rather than relying on instinct alone.
I also became noticeably more confident presenting to professionals I had not met before. By the end, I was presenting independently to project leads and external parties and handling questions on the spot with confidence I had not had at the start.
Services
UX Design
UX Research
UI Design
Tools
Jira
Figma
Miro
Notion
team
Organisation
Municipality of Amsterdam
UX Designer
Tyneisha van Veltum
School
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
