Streamlining insurance processes with automation while documenting memories in the lab.
UI/UX Design Intern
May - December 2023
Adobe CC, Figma, Microsoft Suite, Python, SQL, Robot Framework
The Challenge
COUNTRY Financial is an insurance company that maintains clients across the United States. They hold large sets of information, which they store in databases. Different departments, like the auditing team, work with this data on a daily basis. However, the nature of their tasks is often redundant, tedious, and taxing. We found this problem expressed in both the Master Data Management and Billings teams.
The Process
Within the Master Data Management team, we spent weeks shadowing quality assurance specialists to learn how they completed manual testing. This required learning how to use DBeaver, Notepad++, Microsoft SQL Server, and Excel. At the same time, we set up regular meetings with an architect to better understand the flow of data ingestion. Once we were familiar with the manual testing process, we built out a program that could run repetitive SQL queries.
On the Billings team, we reviewed previous automation projects to decide on a technical stack that would work for our needs. We worked in pairs of two to complete different segments of the project, debugging and refactoring code as we went along. We touched based with one another on a weekly basis, also consulting our technology sponsors.
The Solution
For both projects, we developed scripts in Robot Framework to reduce days of repeated manual work.
The Yearbook
Every year, COUNTRY Financial makes a yearbook to reflect on and celebrate the lab's successes. During my time as an intern, I also got the opportunity to improve my graphic and print design skills by building the 2023 yearbook. I primarily worked on Figma and the Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign) to create the spreads.
Key Takeaways
This marked my first internship in the UI/UX domain. During this experience, I realized the importance of being my own advocate. Especially as the sole UX/UI intern in the summer cohort, I learned how to coherently articulate my designs and ideas to various stakeholders with different authorities within the company.
Moreover, I appreciated the DigitaLab's emphasis on collaboration amongst different fields. As such, I learned how to design under the constraints of business requirements. Because I worked under cross-functional teams, I also had the unique opportunity to build upon my coding skills. I had limited experience in programming before this internship, but I was given the time to learn and implement Python, SQL, and Robot Framework in real world projects.
