Since May 2024, I've had the honor to work as a UX Design intern for Caterpillar Inc starting full time, and transitioning to part time in September, as I went back to school. I worked onsite at their Peoria, IL office, contributing to multiple Cat® Digital projects within their Electrification and Equipment Management teams.

Throughout my senior year, I successfully balanced classwork, clubs, an on-campus job, in addition to my role at Caterpillar. The ability to apply the lessons I have learned in tandem with my school work have allowed me to grow rapidly in both my technical skill set and in my design thinking approach.

As a UX Design intern, my primary responsibility was to collaborate with my mentor to tackle various design challenges. This often involved working with other designers and cross-functional teams, researching, updating old designs, and utilizing the design library to deliver high-quality mockups and prototypes.

Starting my internship with such a high-profile company like Caterpillar presented numerous new challenges and experiences, especially considering it was my first opportunity working with such a large international organization.

My team and mentors guided me through Caterpillar's design principles and introduced me to new techniques, such as auto-layout, scrum, and component-based design, all of which have allowed me to make more efficent and flexible designs.

My own research into Cat's products and tools, and in collaboration with the UX Research team, had given me a better understand their users' needs, allowing me to design solutions that can support and enhance their experiences.

The overall design process was structured but highly collaborative. Often, projects were picked up and transitioned from one designer to another to collaborate on as time and capacity allowed. This meant that when designing, it was imperative that I focused on proper file organization, note taking, and clarity in my designs.

When presented with a new challenge, I would begin researching online and in the design system for patterns, to insure that my design solutions would be brand cohesive and increasing pattern recognition to decrease cognitive load. After the research, I began the iterative design process, scouring Cat's design library to make mid and high-fidelity mockups. I worked closely with the developers, fellow UX designers, and my mentor to iterate on the final flows and annotations to bring them to production ready hand-offs.

When researching, competitive analysis was always the first step for me. Unlike a game project, I was not always well-versed in every aspect needed for Cat's various earth-moving based project. To remedy this, I took extensive notes on my projects, detailing user goals, mechanics, terms and definitions, and more. With this research, I could begin to understand and develop the designs.

With my knowledge up-to-date, I began designing using Cat's expansive design library. I'd often made sketches to start off to develop a clear idea in my head, then transitioned to Figma, testing my ideas and creating multiple iterations to feel out the best solution to my task.

From there, I organized the iterations and noted their differences, later contacting and presenting my work to my mentor as well as other designers and developers depending on my work.

With their feedback, the screens would go through the iterative process, altering fonts, layout, format, text weight, components, and more, maturing into a final design that meets all of the deliverables.

With my screens refined, I set up one last meeting with the developers, to walk them through my process and confirm that it meets the design requirements for the project. If all looks good, the work was transitioned from me and moved to the next stage of development.

During my time at Caterpillar, I had the wonderful opportunity to be involved in a wide variety of projects, modernizing their service's design, cleaning up their file structure, setting up research studies, helping co-workers with last minute work, kickstarting new programs and concepts, handing projects struggling to get off the back burner, and so much more. I brought a fresh perspective and helping hand to the digital world at Cat, creating modern solutions for modern users.