16 / 7-Eleven · Global HQ · 2017
First design internship, under NDA
Summer as an Experience Designer at 7-Eleven's global headquarters, working on data viz for artists, a growth-focused internal app, and a rethink of the consumer app, all covered by NDA.
Role
Experience Designer intern
Team
Embedded with designers and AngularJS developers
Duration
Summer 2017
Platforms
iOS · Web · Internal tools
Problem
First real design job, and the rules were different than school.
I joined 7-Eleven's global headquarters in Irving, TX as an Experience Designer intern in the summer of 2017. It was my first design job on real product work, shipping to real users, on real timelines, alongside engineers who expected specs, not slides.
The culture shock in week one was the honest lesson: an internship isn't a class project. Scope is set by the business, feedback comes from stakeholders who don't owe you a rubric, and design decisions have to survive AngularJS implementation. That reframing is the through-line for everything I did that summer.
Process
Three projects, one posture: ship something a developer can build on Monday.
01 · Data visualization for artists
Designed a data-viz surface intended to make performance and audience data legible to a non-analyst audience, the kind of user who wants an answer, not a query builder. Priority was picking a small number of charts that answered a small number of questions well.
02 · Growth-focused internal app
Contributed to an application aimed at expanding the company, a tool used inside the business rather than by end customers. The design work was less about polish and more about mapping the operational workflow accurately before drawing screens.
03 · Reimagining the consumer app
Prototyped a rethink of the 7-Eleven app experience: user flows, wireframes, and interactive prototypes in Sketch and InVision. The goal was a clearer path from open-the-app to complete-a-task, without the surface becoming another promo shelf.
04 · Working with engineering
Paired with developers on AngularJS tasks, writing HTML, CSS/SASS against the components I designed. Designing with the implementation in view is a habit I picked up here and never let go of.
Use cases
Publicly circulated context, not internal work product.
7-Eleven Global Support Center · Irving, TX
The building I reported to for the summer. The point of including it isn't the architecture. It's the honest reminder that my first design job was inside a real enterprise, not a studio, and the constraints of that environment shaped how I still approach product work today.
Retail app · publicly circulated marketing hero
Publicly available marketing imagery for the 7-Eleven consumer app. It's used here as visual placeholder for a case study whose actual deliverables, flows, wireframes, prototypes, and shipped screens, are under NDA and not shown.
Results
Under NDA, the artifacts I can show are the building and the frame around the work.
3 projects
shipped-or-prototyped over the summer
NDA
all deliverables covered
First job
design + engineering, in one seat
The work itself is covered by NDA and I don't share screens, flows, or artifacts from it. What I can defend is the posture I built that summer: treating engineers as design partners, scoping to what can actually ship, and taking stakeholder feedback as data rather than as a grade.
If you'd like a private walk-through of the projects, I'm happy to have that conversation directly. Everything visible on this page, the HQ photo and the marketing hero for the retail app, is publicly circulated material, not internal work product.
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