Motorola Solutions was my very first time stepping into a big company. I joined as a UX Research Intern, and honestly, I was buzzing with excitement the entire time. This was the kind of place where people relied on what you designed, mission-critical communication tools that literally keep public safety teams connected.
Company
Motorola Solutions
Timeline
2023
—
2023
Role
UX Researcher
Full Case Study
Project overview
My role? Improve the usability of the WAVE PTX platform: a system partners use to manage and rent Motorola’s two-way radios.
The tool was powerful, no doubt, but it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing for users. For partners and agents handling rentals, it often felt overwhelming and clunky. This project wasn’t just about fixing “usability issues.” It was about re-aligning the platform with the real, messy, high-pressure realities of people using it every day.
The platform had layers of complexity, Motorola employees running operations, partners juggling logistics, and customers just needing radios that worked in the field. Somewhere in the middle of all this, workflows had ballooned into something way more complicated than they needed to be.
I still remember realizing that ordering a single license took 18 separate steps. Eighteen. For users under time pressure, that wasn’t just frustrating, it triggered support tickets and slowed everything down.
For me, it was both daunting and exciting. I thought: Okay, I’m just an intern… but if I can make even a tiny dent here, it could actually help people who rely on these systems in the real world.
Challenges
The big question guiding us was: How do we streamline workflows without breaking compliance in such a high-stakes environment? And honestly, the even bigger one was: How do we make a tool this complex actually feel intuitive?
We broke the problem down into three parts: learning from the best (through competitive analysis of AWS, Azure, and others), walking through user journeys step-by-step (role-play testing), and then mapping insights into something stakeholders could act on. It was detective work meets storytelling, and I loved every second of it.
I got to run with a lot of the research. Over the summer, I led 25+ interviews and job-shadowing sessions with teams across North America, Europe, and India. I took on note-taking, synthesis, and building this huge, color-coded insights spreadsheet that basically became the bible for our findings
From there, I created journey maps of the end-to-end process, spotting exactly where users got stuck or felt lost. One of my favorite “aha” moments was presenting that 18-step license ordering process, you could almost hear the collective “wait, what?!” in the room. That was the turning point that showed just how badly simplification was needed.
Results
At the end of my internship, we presented a Top 5 Pain Points & Recommendations report to senior stakeholders. It felt surreal as an intern to see how seriously they took it, the clarity of the findings actually influenced future design direction for the platform.
Working at Motorola taught me a lot, but here’s the big one: structure is everything. When you’re swimming in transcripts, spreadsheets, and interviews, you need systems (checklists, color codes, frameworks) to make sense of it all.
And on a personal level, I realized how much I love turning complex, overwhelming data into simple, human-centered stories. Because in the end, usability isn’t about fancy research methods or frameworks… it’s about making sure people in the field can just get their job done.
Full Case Study
