This summer I spent my time interning at Acesse Corporation in Redwood City as an iOS Developer. The work, however, was two-fold–I had the wonderful opportunity to design and develop. My former boss from Angie's List had moved over to Acesse and called me back in to intern for him again to design and develop. Their newest product (a chat client) was in need of a new UI, which I had the chance to propose and develop.

As the company is fairly young, I was one of the only graphic designers in the company, which meant a majority of the design work was up to me. However in this setting I was able to better understand collaborative working in the workplace amongst different teams. I was reporting to marketing, engineering (let's not forget front-end AND back-end, iOS and Android), QA, management teams and any combination of those teams. With a redesign comes a plenitude of things to consider: flow, new features (and how they are ensued), user expectations/reactions, upcoming design trends, general app flow, feasibility, fat fingers, older audiences and approval across teams. This was a hefty load of work for a pre-college student as it was, but I genuinely enjoyed the work. I also did have the chance to work build and develop certain features of the application (so yes, I did have plenty objective-C work).

In summary I genuinely enjoyed the work because it provided insights for effective cross collaboration and project management. This was a very new, refreshing experience for me because most of the projects I've worked on had not used so many resources. I look forward to working on large-scale projects like these in the future.