Sherry Yan

Helped designed the interface of FormsPro at the Omnibyte Office in Fargo, ND. 

Product Design Internship

FormsPro (Frameworks, Icons, Language)

January 2021 - June 2021

Balsamiq Software, Balsamiq Cloud, Microsoft Office Tools

My senior STEM Capstone took me to North Dakota State University's Technology Incubator Office for a product design internship. This was officially an 8-week (about half a semester) long internship aligning with the capstone. However, I returned to the office throughout the first month of summer, turning this experience into a mentorship, working under the company's director and team.

Their product, which I helped on is FormsPro, a digital service that helps customers effectively and efficiently manage complex business processes and required paperwork.

01.  Designed software icons and produced frameworks, collaborating closely with the company Director of Product and Customer Experience and my mentor, Sonja Berry, to understand and work within their design guidelines.

02. Learned to design within deadlines in a professional team setting, collaborating with cross-functional partners across all stages, from research to design to engineering. Attended team meetings.

03. Worked on implementing new translations to the software interface, with the guidance of other designers in the company.

01. Bringing visuals and speaking concisely are helpful when sharing ideas and asking questions with mentors and cross-functional partners. By sharing my explorations and visual references, no matter how low-fidelity they were as I was still a student, I could better communicate with mentors, engineers, designers, and researchers about feasibility and other curiosities.

02. Helping manage a large-scale, professional project. I set up priorities based on the project deadlines and my individual goals, and shared them with my mentor to be better integrated into the system, and be more transparent.  This provided my mentors a better vision on how to guide and teach me. 

03. Being pro-active, organized and bold! Being in a professional setting for this internship for my senior capstone project was step far from my comfort zone, and it was challenging to explore beyond into new territories of knowledge, and especially asking for help in certain steps. But allowing myself that humility and vulnerability to learn, changing my mindset and interacting more with everyone in the office helped me to achieve a lot more in this experience.

This internship experience was filled with learing new things, meeting incredible people and mentors, and being bold and creative in a setting that I previously had no exposure to. I had the privilege of working under the guidance of many passionate and patient mentors during this internship; I felt that it was the catalyst to my dedication to pursue design in the future. I felt I learned and grew so much.