Hi, I’m Yingying
I'm a User Experience designer who's spent most of my career making complex technical systems feel intuitive, across IoT platforms, cloud infrastructure, financial services, and more recently, AI-native products.
I frequently reflect on how I can become a better designer and a more creative person, and I share these thoughts and experiences here.
My path into user experience started with curiosity about why so many things are unnecessarily hard to use. Like many others, I often found myself using inconvenient and hard-to-use items, simply accepting them and letting them waste my time. However, no one should have to struggle with poorly designed everyday items, and this led me to dive deep into user experience design through books and projects. Eventually, I became a user experience designer after earning my computer science degree.
My first full-time job as a user experience designer involved redesigning a company’s web platform – a challenging task for someone with limited design experience. Without any design mentorship, I forged my own path, embracing trials and errors, and discovering countless amusing moments along the way.
Though English is not my first language, I’ve worked hard to become confident in expressing my designs and presenting my ideas to groups of people. To face my fear of speaking English, I challenged myself by joining Toastmasters public speaking clubs and even won 2nd place in a division-level speech contest. Overcoming language barriers has made me more empathetic towards users with different backgrounds.
Lately that curiosity has taken me into AI: Building iOS apps, programming hardware, experimenting with what these tools can and can't do. I've been at it since 2023 and I'm still surprised regularly. That's mostly what this blog has become about.
My experiences have taught me that the key to success, whether in design or any other field, lies in a tireless willingness to learn. I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to learn from people, books, projects, and events.
When I’m not working, I enjoy spending quality time with my family and nurturing my creative side by designing and building things with my own hands.
What’s in there for you?
You can expect to get my perspectives on working better as a designer, stories of challenges I’ve faced and how I tackled them, and experiments I do to stay creative.
Opinions are my own.
Where else to follow me
Sketchnotes (Instagram)
涂生活（微信公众号）
