Neoboard ∙ Internship
Role
UX Design Intern
Timeline
June - September 2025
Skills and Tools
Design Systems
Figma
Team
1 CEO and Founder
2 Engineering Interns
7 UX Design Interns
Overview
Exposure to the Startup Space
As a UX Design Intern at Neoboard, a startup building tools to support educators, I focused on bringing structure and scalability to an early stage product team. With features being designed and shipped rapidly, inefficiencies in the design process created friction between designers and engineers.
I took the lead on conducting a UX audit, establishing rapport, and building the foundations of a design system that streamlined collaboration, improved consistency, and accelerated handoff.
Restructured design screens with auto-layout
Component library structure and organization
Context
About Neoboard
What is Neoboard?
A classroom workflow web application aimed at improving student engagement and reducing teacher workload
As part of Neoboard's 7-person design team, we face significant challenges with high turnover: designers often join and leave each quarter. This constant flow makes maintaining design consistency difficult and requires us to onboard quickly while keeping work aligned.
In our startup environment, many designers are interns or newer to the field, creating gaps in UX maturity across the team. This leads to fragmented designs with inconsistent typefaces, unnecessary component duplication, and a lack of standardization, slowing our process and complicating developer handoffs.
Upgrading our design system is crucial to maintain consistency, onboard new designers efficiently, and enable smoother handoffs to developers. This allows us to focus on real priorities identified from previous research rather than constantly dealing with design fragmentation.
The Challenge
Current Organizational State
The Problem
High turnover among our design team required an upgraded design system
Inconsistent design elements and a lack of standardization across the team led to challenges
There's gaps in both the user experience and design handoff processes
Previous design library showing inconsistencies
Startups thrive on speed, but speed creates fragmentation
At Neoboard, design files were inconsistent, components weren't standardized, and features weren't always aligned with MVP scope. This lack of structure led to repeated demos, inefficient iterations, and misalignments with engineering.
Inefficient Structures
Screens weren't built in auto-layout, making iteration and responsiveness time-consuming
Inconsistent Components
Buttons, text styles, and layouts varied across files
Collaboration Gaps
Engineers lacked a clear framework for interpreting designs, leading to back-and-forth clarifications
Thinking in the Developer's Shoes
Engineers implemented their own naming conventions and spacing—no standardized design system or structure between teams caused delays
Research
Identifying Needs
Reviewing Feedback
Our main goal initially was to get out demos to identify areas for improvement. Demos exposed inconsistent designs due to a lack of a standardized design system.
As we were collectively doing demos, some educators found the platform's features useful, but noted inconsistent UI elements. Feedback emphasized the need for a cohesive design flow to simplify adoption.
"The features are useful, but the inconsistent UI elements make it harder to adopt."
— Educator Feedback
Conducted demos and surveys with educators
Analyzing patterns internally in our organization
Design Focus
Addressing Pain Points
Understanding the Teams
I started by researching established design libraries for inspiration, which helped me understand how successful systems were structured and provided clear direction for improving our own.
I initiated conversations with engineers to align our designs with their tech stack (React, Bootstrap, and Flexbox) ensuring components would be compatible for smoother handoff and implementation.
During weekly meetings, I asked the design team about their biggest pain points and discovered they struggled to locate components. This highlighted the need for better documentation and organization to enhance findability and workflow efficiency.
Based on these insights, I prioritized two key areas for impact:
Auto-Layout & Component Library
Structured reusable components and auto-layout
Restructured design screens into auto-layout to allow flexible, responsive design
Built a component library of buttons, form fields, and navigation elements organized by category
Paired with another intern to run knowledge-sharing sessions
12-Column Grid System
Based on React Bootstrap for design-dev consistency
Introduced a grid system to ensure consistency between design and development
Outlined grid usage rules and documented them for engineers
Bridged the gap between Figma and code implementation
Conducting a UX Audit
Our first step was conducting a comprehensive UX audit of existing designs, taking stock of all components to identify which were used consistently and which were redundant or unused.
A key part of this process was standardizing typeface and color styles, assigning font sizes and weights logically using HTML-style headings (H1, H2, H3, H4) to create consistency and make it easier for engineers to implement designs accurately.
Establishing the Design System
Next, we cleaned up components to ensure consistency across all platform pages, consolidating similar components and removing unnecessary duplicates.
A major issue we discovered was that many components were only used on one page, creating inconsistency across the app. We streamlined the design process and made it easier to maintain a cohesive look and feel by eliminating these one-off components.
Ensuring components are consistent across pages and styles are standardized
Improvements
Empowering Change Through Communication and Standardization
Cross-Team Collaboration
Held training sessions to teach Figma features such as auto layout and components
Brought the design team up to speed on the design library to ensure everyone was aligned
Opened dialogue with engineers to ensure the design handoff process was clear and efficient
Preparing for Usability Testing
Reflecting on demo feedback, the design team prepared for usability testing by planning to apply the finalized design library. The goal was to evaluate how well the new system improved efficiency, consistency, and overall usability for the team.
Even though my internship ended before we could fully complete the usability testing, we had already laid the groundwork for a smoother process moving forward.
Organizing components and adding properties for easy reuse
Assessing the effectiveness of the design library
Impact and Outcomes
Retrospective
Contributions and Wins
We had established a standardized design library and improved collaboration between the design and development teams. This created a more cohesive path for the team to continue refining the product.
100%
Adoption rate by designers and engineers
Faster
Iteration speed for designers using reusable components
Clearer
Communication between design and engineering teams
What I've Personally Taken Away…
Learned to balance the need for speed with the importance of long-term systems thinking
Discovered the impact of stepping back to fix foundational issues rather than only focusing on features
Strengthened skills in communicating design intent to engineers and building shared language across disciplines
Moving Forward
This work established the groundwork for Neoboard's design system, a foundation that can evolve as the product scales. Looking ahead, Neoboard can expand this system into a full design library, align it with accessibility best practices, and extend it into brand-level guidelines.
Being Vocal
Importance of vocalizing concerns to leadership when spotting inefficiencies
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Building trust between design and engineering through structured processes