Virtual Internships · 2025–26
Application Flow
Was 28 minnow 12 min
A five-step application, rebuilt around a single premise: never lose what someone has already typed. Long forms fail at the boundary between steps and at the moment a tab closes, and that is where the work went.
Hybrid auto-save
Persistence runs at two speeds. On blur, the field writes to localStorage — synchronous, free, and available even if the network is gone. Separately, a debounced write persists to the API, so a draft survives the browser as well as the tab.
On return, a draft is recovered rather than silently discarded. Refreshing mid-application is the most ordinary thing a user can do and it should cost nothing.
Credit
Built with a product designer, who owned the flow structure and the visual design. The engineering decisions described above are mine; the shape of the thing was a joint effort.