InfoSim Frontend Intern

Time:: May 2024-March 2025.
Collaboration:: Intern, working under a supervisor on a 6-person frontend team
Tools:: Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop, Figma

Objectives:

Formally analyze StableNet’s web portal client, identifying and describing interaction flaws in the proposed interfaces
Prototype a wizard popup that conforms to InfoSim’s current web client design system and meets the feature needs of IT professionals
Design representations of types of automated network management as recognizable large icons for their setup wizard

Icon of a StableNet agent beside a stack of servers — A Stablenet Agent and a Server.

Diagram of agents connected to servers across a network, reporting back to a client — Visual representation of a Stablenet-maintained network - Agents are connected to a server on the network. The agent reports network statistics and visualizations back to the client.

About

The rich client and the web portal are two ways to access the same product - the former has access to more of StableNet’s more specialized features, including creating measurement templates for the StableNet agent present on a network, but is much more time consuming to install. The latter offers a solution to the accessibility problem, being available on any device that can connect to the Internet through a simple login, but it lacks the same measurement features as the rich client, and is currently only used for monitoring networks.

Achieving feature parity is a long-term goal of the StableNet development team, and for my internship, we decided that creating a set of icons to represent the measurements present in the rich client and lacking in the web portal for implementation later would be the best use of my time as an intern and the best use of my abilities as a graphic designer/user experience designer. I also designed interfaces for the network manager wizard and analyzed the UX implications of interactions that were currently being developed in the web portal.

I spent time getting acquainted with the web client’s documentation and design system and learning about the various measurements that StableNet agents can perform through vulgarizations by the software engineers in the building.

Fake logos for InfoSim’s rich client, created for storytelling purposes.

After I moved back to the United States, I transitioned to working remotely in Austin as a UX designer with a local part-time US team. I collaborated with the solution engineers that presented StableNet at Texas area IT trade shows to help people get acquainted with the software by organizing an in-software demo.

Reflections

Lack of intern infrastructure made it easier to meaningfully contribute - I was InfoSim’s first intern, which ironically made my work more applicable to the real work being done on the frontend. Because there was no intern infrastructure in place for supervising independent projects, part of my assigned work became finding the work itself within the design system rather than doing predetermined tasks that might not contribute to the team’s long-term goals.