During my Summer 2025 internship at Kahua, I contributed to projects aimed at improving the consistency, usability, and visual clarity of the platform. My work included designing mobile app prototypes, conceptualizing AI-driven features, and refining platform layout and navigation patterns. The Product Help project became my primary focus, addressing critical discoverability challenges for users while enhancing content management capabilities for admins.
Help resources are scattered across the platform, making it difficult for users to locate when needed. At the same time, admins lack tools to manage or customize this content. This created two key challenges:
From these challenges, two goals emerged:
Since I joined after the project began, I relied on user insights and other resources to understand needs, identify opportunities, explore established conventions for solutions.
In my first weeks, I immersed myself in the product and the UX team’s design system by exploring files, asking questions, and interacting directly with the platform.
I created an opportunity-solution tree map, a technique I learned from my manager that visualizes potential paths to desired outcomes while balancing business and customer needs.
I also mapped two user flows (one per user type) to illustrate decision points and actions. These were created in FigJam and help maintain clarity between design, product, and development teams.
As I developed a clearer understanding of user needs, pain points, and outcomes, I created a project brief within the design file. It included an overview and purpose, terminology, risks, assumptions, customer questions, and future concepts or solutions. Most importantly, I documented requirements for admins, end users, and developers. From there, I sketched initial wireframes on the whiteboard.
Over several weeks, I used Figma to design and iterate on both desktop and mobile prototypes, incorporating feedback from my manager and team. I relied on the design system and adhered to established patterns to ensure consistency across the platform.
The final design included three interconnected components that simplified access for users and empowered admins with new customization tools:
A central hub where admins manage help content, enabling them to create resources tailored to their organization’s needs.
A tool within Configuration to organize help resources into sections for easier navigation, while also allowing other permission types to access and customize content within the app.
A contextual assistant that displays relevant help based on user context, with search and filters for faster, and more intuitive access.
The Product Help solution successfully addressed the challenges of help discoverability and admin content management. It provided measurable improvements that created value for both users and admins:
While Product Help was my primary project, I also contributed to other app concepts, AI-driven initiatives, and platform navigation improvements. Due to confidentiality, I cannot share details or final designs, but here’s an overview:
Designed mobile prototypes for two role-specific apps, tailoring functionality to distinct needs and introducing new patterns for mobile users while balancing consistency with existing design standards.
Conceptualized UI for AI-assisted workflows to reduce repetitive tasks, focusing on contextual suggestions that build trust and simplify processes.
Enhanced the overall platform layout to improve visibility of required actions, prepared testing materials, and observed user sessions to validate improvements.
This was my first internship and my first opportunity to work on projects that impact users. I also learned a great deal about construction, an industry I discovered to be highly complex as it shifts toward technology to support the work of many different roles. The experience taught me valuable lessons about working within a product team and showed me how design decisions can influence workflows in construction and help people work more efficiently.
