Internship, Tokyo, June to August 2026

Sollo

Eight weeks in Tokyo as Sollo’s UI/UX engineering intern, designing and building an app that helps foreign residents of Japan get through government paperwork. It is on the App Store now.

What Sollo is

Sollo is a company in Tokyo. Its app helps foreign residents of Japan find official help: visas and residency, benefits, healthcare, housing and local services. Its assistant, Ask Sollo, answers from real government documents, in plain language and in nine languages.

The app, Sollo Life Nav, has been on the App Store since 18 August 2026.

Why I was there

Japan was the dream first. Before the school year started I told my parents that the next summer I would be interning in Japan, and then I went and chased it. Tech is what I have always been into, and Japan is where I wanted to see it made.

I applied through CIEE, and I still remember the interview: they kept pushing me and testing what I knew, and I loved it. Sollo handed me the UI/UX work I had never had before, believed in me, let me go all out on the designs, and then made me defend them. Defending them taught me the most.

For those eight weeks I was a foreigner in Tokyo too, so the reader was never hard to picture.

70+pull requests merged in eight weeks
9languages shipped, including Easy Japanese
8×faster core browse flow, 1,033ms to 125ms
2,949tests green at handoff

What I did

Redesigned the navigation. I drew it eleven ways in three turns, rebuilt the signed-in app to the pick, and wired it to the live services.
Built the design system. Colour, spacing and type tokens, a shared widget and icon library, and a light and dark theme, all under an automated WCAG AA contrast check.
Shipped every string in nine languages. Nothing went out as English with a fallback, Easy Japanese included.
Caught accessibility misses before readers did. A colour in a design handoff measured 2.72:1, so it shipped at 4.60:1, one step up the designer’s own palette. A tap target the spec sized at 36 points shipped at 48.
Worked across the whole stack: design, the mobile app and the Python backend.

Try it: the navigation, in three turns

Before I rebuilt the app, I drew its navigation on a design canvas, a board of phones side by side, three times over. Pick a turn:

Show a turn Turn 1 A switcher Turn 2 Wild cards Turn 3 The rules

Turn 1, titled A switcher that looks like Sollo, not a stock tab bar: three phones showing a ticket-stub dock at the bottom, stamped pass tabs at the top, and a floating navigator orb fanned open. — Turn 1: three switchers that look like Sollo, not a stock tab bar.

Turn 2, titled Three from imagination, no brief attached: a phone with a slim vertical rail on the left, a dark home with glowing round portals along the bottom, and a pull-up sheet listing the four surfaces. — Turn 2: three wild cards, with no brief attached.

Turn 3, titled Best of, mixed, accessible and foolproof: five phones, 3a a big labelled dock marked recommended, 3b a portal dock, 3c tabs at the top marked runner-up, 3e an always-there bar, and 3f a segmented pill. — Turn 3: five options, each held to the same four rules: labels always visible, targets of 60px or more, a high-contrast active state, and nothing hidden.

The call I would make again

Sixteen days after I built the five-tab navigation, I cut it to a single screen for the public beta. Three of the five tabs were still “coming soon”, and a row of doors that open onto nothing is not navigation. The dock was parked, not deleted, for when those parts ship.

Two rows of three phones titled One surface, night and day: open with search as the app, a straight answer with its official source, and an answer built from the official documents when no guide matched, first in a dark palette and then in a light one. — The single screen, in the night palette and the day palette.

Four onboarding frames from Figma, one per language: English, Japanese, Easy Japanese and Vietnamese. The Japanese frame labels the name field with kanji, and the Easy Japanese frame writes the same labels in hiragana. — Onboarding in four of the nine languages. Easy Japanese writes the same labels in hiragana, for readers who know some Japanese but not the official kind.

Twelve small designs of the Your Journeys bar, labelled A to L: stacked rings, a warm feature card, a minimal link with dots, a dark accent bar, a two-stat split, inline chips, and six compact slim lines. — One component, the bar back into a checklist in progress, drawn twelve ways before one was built.