UX researchexperience designproduct strategy

Experience Design at Brightly

A UX design internship embedded within Brightly's product team, spanning user research, competitive analysis, analytics integration, and design system work across three parallel initiatives.

Brightly data sync case study cover preview — Brightly internship impact preview image.

Role: UX Design & PO Intern
Timeline: 8-month internship
Tools: Figma, Pendo, Jira, Miro, Claude

Setup time: 2–3 hoursto under 15 minutes
Sustainability managers empowered: 100+
User stories written and refined: 14

Overview

I worked across three overlapping projects

As a UX design and PO intern at Brightly, I worked across three parallel initiatives with one shared goal: design that bridges users, engineers, and stakeholders.

Closing the Gap Between Brightly and ENERGY STAR

Sustainability teams were manually syncing ENERGY STAR data inside Brightly Stream, which took hours and introduced errors at every handoff. I ran competitive analysis, assessed API feasibility, designed wireframes and prototypes, and led usability testing to redesign the integration experience. This reduced setup time from 2–3 hours to under 15 minutes for 100+ sustainability managers across North America.

View protected case study

Brightly platform preview used for the benchmarking integration initiative

Making User Behavior Visible

Pendo is a product analytics and user feedback platform that helps teams understand how users navigate their product, which features they adopt, and where they drop off. I spearheaded the migration of client feedback into Pendo, earned a Pendo Essentials certification, and built a comprehensive analytics dashboard that gave the product team a single source of truth for tracking general usage, engagement, feature adoption, retention, time to value, and user characteristics across Stream's external user base. The dashboard turned scattered input into a votable, prioritized pipeline that informed product decisions with real behavioral data.

Design System Alignment with Siemens

Siemens design system audit showing Brightly interface components and states

When Siemens acquired Brightly, two design languages needed to speak the same dialect. I audited core UI components, toasts, the top app bar, and tabs, against Siemens design standards, identifying inconsistencies in interaction patterns, visual hierarchy, and component behavior. The audit produced a clear path for bringing Brightly's component library into alignment with Siemens standards, reducing UI inconsistency across the product suite and laying the groundwork for a more scalable, unified design system.

Impact

My work had impact across three areas.

Research

User research surfaced requirements before a single line of code was written, reducing rework and aligning services around user needs.

Analytics

Consolidating feedback into Pendo created a single source of truth for feature requests, turning scattered input into a votable, prioritized pipeline.

Alignment

Design system audit work bridged Brightly and Siemens standards, reducing inconsistency in core UI components across the product suite.

Reflection

This project sharpened how I design for enterprise complexity without making the interface feel heavy.

What I learned

Enterprise UX is often about deciding what complexity belongs on the surface, what belongs one layer deeper, and what needs clearer system feedback before a user can act confidently.

Technical fluency made the design sharper

Bringing my software engineering background into the feasibility assessment helped me ask better implementation questions early and build credibility with engineering partners.

What I would improve next

If I had more time and resources I would push for another round of testing with fresh participants from the services team to validate the revised row affordance and error-recovery flow, then measure setup completion, time to resolve sync failures, and support dependency after release.

A favorite desk at the Brightly office overlooking city buildings — my fav desk at office + some appreciation

Kudos message appreciating Astha's first research project — my fav desk at office + some appreciation

Good design at an enterprise company lives in the handoff, between research and requirements, between tools and teams, between one brand and another.