Pekin Insurance
This was my first look of what working in a professional field of UX was like. Through this internship I got to learn a lot of new ideas and practices that I have now grown accustomed to when I work on a new project. I was also able to contribute to both my team and Pekin as a whole in helping with their redesign process for their new agent portal.
Introduction to Agile Method
Part of my experience at Pekin as their UX intern was learning their pace of work on how they frequently get projects done. To help track this I was introduced to the JIRA ticket system by my Scrum Master. JIRA helped me get used to planning and getting project tasks done in two week sprints throughout my internship. Working in Agile has taught me to work more efficiently for all my UX and other class assignments during my time at Bradley.
Redesigning Guidewire Policy Inquiry
Part of the first couple weeks of my internship my supervisor wanted me to explore Pekin Insurance's interface for their systems. The objective he wanted me to do was redesign some of the older versions of these systems that Pekin was still using and design them in my interpretation while also using the new brand guidelines that Pekin Insurance was implementing. My first redesign process was taking a look into their Guidewire Policy Inquiry.
Main Portal System Faults
When moving to my main project at Pekin Insurance which was helping the UX team with the process of redesigning Pekin Insurances main agent portal, I first got a look at the new guidelines they were implementing. Upon learning of how they wanted their new system to look that meant for me to look into the old system and redesign all the faults each screen of the old system had when thinking about the redesign. Common faults I found were hard to read font colors, elements taking too much of screen/scroll space, outdated icons, and questionable background colors.
Implementing the Changes
When working in the redesign process, I took into account all the faults shown above and reworked them to match new brand guideline that the Pekin UX team had already started. Compared to the old system which had focused on using the red and whites of Pekin's brand, the new system is a more streamline look with focus of having more whitespace and using a teal as a main color source. Most of the process was breaking down the old system and finding ways to make each screen more pleasing to the eye and also limiting scroll space so users wouldn't have to scroll too far through the screen to see everything.
