In high school, I helped make our school magazine with fellow club members. We interviewed Taiwanese comic artists and the Vietnamese owners of a restaurant near our school. I barely remember what we asked now, but I still remember sitting across from people whose lives were very different from mine and getting to hear about them for an hour.

In college, I took psychology and social science research classes as part of my program and worked in a multimedia lab. One of the projects used eye tracking to study how people read augmented-reality books. I loved seeing where someone’s attention went first, and then thinking about how the layout could better support the way they were actually reading.

I found UX through an information architecture course, where I redesigned a search system. Later on, I explored it further through internships, including work with PDIS, a public-interest technology team in Taiwan’s government, on usability testing for government websites. I also took on product management internships and freelance design work to see more of how products get designed, built, and brought to life.

After graduating in 2020, I moved to the U.S. to study HCI at Indiana University. That’s where I got more hands-on with interaction design, prototyping, and UX research methods. I’d already been interested in how people find information and make sense of systems during college. The master’s gave me a way to turn those interests into things I could build.

In my first UX role at EXL, I spent almost two years on a university learning management system, working closely with the client PM, college instructors, and engineers. Later, I moved across enterprise data and AI products, and also worked with a client marketing team on a large website redesign.

The projects changed, but I kept finding myself drawn to the same thing: untangling what people actually needed within a complicated problem, then finding a way to make it work.