Selected Work
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Crunchbase
Redesigning the Pro Trial Buy Flow
Pricing moved to step one. Trial starts up 5% in four weeks.
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Crunchbase
An Upsell Framework for AI Predictions
Layers, not tiers. MQLs up 12%, and a pattern later AI features reused.
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NYC Department of Education
School Finder NYC
An Admissions Guide for 80,000 students and the families helping them.
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MONC XIII
Redesigning a Luxury Interiors E-Commerce Site
Session duration up 82%, bounce rate down 16%, in the first week.
Design Philosophy
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Goals are stable, tools are not.
What you're trying to achieve rarely changes, and neither does what the people you're designing for are trying to achieve. How you get there does, especially now.
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Give the room something to point at.
Design is a communication layer before it's anything else. Alignment doesn't come from another meeting, it comes from a shared object, a prototype, a rough sketch, something people can react to instead of argue about in the abstract.
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Always have a hypothesis.
Design without one is just decoration. The best designs have a clear goal attached, because they started as a hypothesis, not a guess dressed up after the fact.
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Process of elimination.
Sometimes the fastest way forward is cutting the bad options out, one by one, until the right one is obvious.
About
Product design is where my three favorite things meet: people, art, and technology. I have loved drawing for as long as I can remember. I was classically trained in pencil in China, and I have been taking fine arts classes at the college level since high school.
I studied Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University, which is an unusual path into product design and the one that taught me the most about it. It trained me in ethnography, which is really a discipline of attention: to what people say, to how they say it, and to what they do next. That training matters more now than it ever has. When someone can ask a model for what they want in their own words, the design problem is understanding what they actually mean and what they are trying to get done.
For the last four years I was the sole designer behind Crunchbase's self-serve flow, which drives 80% of its ARR. I facilitated our design guild, was the main contributor to the design system through the company's AI relaunch, and I was the first designer there to ship code to production.
Outside work: hanging out with Lucky, the black cat on the desk, baking, and learning to needlepoint Christmas stockings.
