I am a global award-winning UX designer, an artist, a strategist, and a critical thinker. I am also a former architectural designer. My extensive experience in design, art, and strategy spans diverse fields, ranging from global corporations to startups.

2024 was a fruitful year for me because I won multiple prestigious design awards across UX design, product design, service design, and strategy design fields, and my artworks were recognized and exhibited globally.

It all began with a love for art. Art allowed me to explore the relationship between myself and the world during my journey of self-discovery. Design, on the other hand, opened the door to a broader horizon, introducing me to areas like business, strategy, product & market, operations, etc.

Working in the UX design field has enabled me to switch from exploring myself to understanding others, integrating users' needs and wants with product strategies, turning abstract ideas into practical and creative solutions, creating delightful user experiences with unique product features, expanding user pool and further driving market growth. 

For me, choosing to be both a designer and an artist is not just about excelling professionally but also about becoming the best version of myself.

With two years of management experience and eight years in design, I have gained a deep understanding that, unlike art, design is a practical discipline aimed at solving problems. However, design should go beyond merely solving problems—it should take a developmental, holistic, and operational perspective to strategically plan and position a product for long-term vision and short-term objectives within its market ecosystem.

This translates into the product structure, the specific features, and how they benefit the targeted users. I believe you can see the points above from one of my award-winning projects, Insight Flow, when I was a lead UX designer at Enki.ai.

In my management experience, I focus on effectively allocating, integrating, and optimizing resources through well-designed mechanisms, as well as placing the right people in the right roles, setting strategic roadmaps with clear accountability and incentives, and shaping a healthy team culture to encourage creativity and efficiency. 

In addition to my design career, I am an independent artist, focusing on visual and digital contemporary art. For me, art is not just an expression. It merges critical, heuristic, creative thinking ingeniously and unrestrainedly. It can also be strategic, holistic, exploratory, and human-centered.

Art is thinking itself and my artistic and design practices constantly influence and enrich one another, enabling me to approach both fields with a unique perspective and greater creativity.

To me, design is a highly interdisciplinary and comprehensive discipline. The core is solving problems both practically and creatively. Whether one can synthesize diverse perspectives with different thinking abilities is the prerequisite for determining the quality of a design solution.

This means understanding a product's position and business goals within the market ecosystem, both holistically and in detail, uncovering root causes from surface-level challenges, identifying critical leverage points, and designing strategy and mechanism with iterative testing and improvement for scalable solutions.

In user-centered experience design, it also means creating smooth and delightful user experiences that address users' needs, wants, and pain points while incorporating feedback loops for further design improvement, which not only solves problems but also enhances the product's market appeal and drives business growth.

My favorite type of design is one that creates a positive social impact, because pursuing profit at the expense of making a positive contribution to society undermines the true purpose of design.

As a designer, social responsibility is vital. It allows us to stay true to our core values amidst intense market competition. By designing thoughtful product architectures and delightful user experiences with aesthetics that fit the product’s characteristics, and strategically allocating and integrating resources, we empower businesses to consistently create positive societal impact while maintaining competitiveness. This also builds a solid foundation for the long-term success and sustainable growth of the businesses.

To me, good design must understand and respect the inherent nature of humans while truly creating benefits for them with delightful and smooth user experiences.

Why is respecting the inherent nature of humans so important? The inherent nature of humans reflects ingrained patterns encoded in our genes, represented through our subconsciousness, consciousness, emotions, and behaviors. As long as the target users are ordinary people — not individuals with innate or acquired superhuman abilities, including those enhanced by implanted chips — respecting the inherent nature of humans means adhering to a fundamental principle of design.

In user experience design, I believe that design style and characteristics are primarily pointed to the design methodology. Because different products have different user groups, which require aesthetics/styles to align with their specific needs and preferences; for example, an educational video platform for children would require significantly different design aesthetics/styles compared to the ones for business professionals.

Designers should avoid letting their personal aesthetic preferences or styles limit the user experience or overshadow the visual preference and the needs of the target user group.

Since my design work spans UX/UI design, product design, service design, and strategic design — fields that share core principles — I will talk about my design process collectively.

My design process begins with a thorough and pragmatic understanding of the situation—assessing the needs and pain points of users, stakeholders, the pipelines, etc. The purpose is to identify the problems and the relations between them.

Then, using different thinking abilities to break down what had been identified and uncover the root cause from the surface. This process is accompanied by continuous user and stakeholder research.

Once the root causes are discovered, the next step is to evaluate the nature of the problem—whether it's a people, workflow, ecosystem problem, or a combination of these issues, and what are the core inner logics of each problem—while considering the involved stakeholders and maintaining focus on both short-term objectives and long-term goals.

This helps me distinguish between primary and secondary issues and select or craft the most appropriate design methodologies or a hybrid of approaches that are tailored to the project timeline.

A critical methodology of my design is creating logical feedback loops, with key touch-points integrated into the pipeline to gather actionable data for ongoing evaluation and refinement. Through continuous usability testing and improvements, the design evolves to boost user engagement, retention rate, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and ultimately driving profitability and operational efficiency.

Yes, I believe so! Especially in design, the impact of thinking is crucial. It's mainly about the dialectical nature of things: being two sides of the same coin, which is a classic philosophical idea of Laozi.

Design should recognize this duality, leveraging the useful aspects while transforming the unnecessary ones, ensuring that both work together in a closed loop to continuously drive positive results.

This is a truly meaningful recognition of both the design and product for my company and me. To me, It is also an inspiring source of motivation for my future design career.

I will continue to deepen my understanding of design, product, user experience, and the market, strengthen my design thinking abilities both in depth and breadth, and bring innovative designs that deliver meaningful value and experience to users while advancing product excellence.

The winning entry I submitted to the 2024 MUSE Design Awards is Insight Flow: Iterative Research Solution Empowered by AI. I chose this project because the global challenges of energy and sustainability are major topics for the future world. The development of AI makes energy efficiency even more urgent, and various industries will face the complex demands of a sustainable energy transition.

Enki.ai, the company behind this project, is a B2B SaaS company specializing in climate tech market insights, helping businesses achieve a seamless energy transition.

One key challenge lies in delivering effective insights tailored to the specific circumstances, mission, vision, milestones, and inspirations of different businesses. This is especially true for companies that are not familiar with the energy sector, and even less familiar with the complexities of the energy transition, not to mention that extracting actionable insights is further complicated by a wide range of intricate factors involved.

The Insight Flow project was designed to address these challenges. It provides Enki.ai with a customizable insights-scanning solution with dynamic data visualization, instant interactive analysis, and multiple end-user controls that enables businesses to tailor their insights-scanning process according to their unique situations, goals, needs, and pain points. Beyond the energy-focused capabilities, this level of customization sets Enki.ai apart from other market intelligence platforms.

This design fully embraces the iterative nature of learning. Drawing inspiration from the hierarchy of effects model, the designed features, such as AI Search, Input Customization, Dynamic Tree Structure, Interactive Heat Maps, and AI Training, guide users through the entire research process — from cognition to evaluation and, finally, confirmation.

Additionally, the design introduces nested loops to house all the features, with each loop equipped with end-user controls. These controls empower users to make flexible, multi-level, cross-referencing adjustments and improvements to their insight-scanning process.

Combined with interactive data visualization, users can clearly see and analyze the relationships between key data points, extract relevant insights, and make informed decisions tailored to their specific circumstances, mission, vision, milestones, and inspirations. Also, with the nested loop in place, users do not have to go through all five steps—from AI Search to AI Training—for every iteration of research.

Instead, they can efficiently and flexibly refine their research by adjusting the end-user controls to better serve their specific situations and goals. This adaptability is one of the key highlights of this design.

As the lead UX designer on this project, I went through Enki.ai's business transition from a general market insights platform to a climate-tech-focused product. To achieve a scalable design that accommodates both existing and new users while aligning with the company's short-term objectives and long-term strategies, I worked closely with the CEO and chief engineer.

Together, we set the strategic direction, revised the roadmap, and reprioritized pain points, tasks, and solutions. During the process, I independently handled the end-to-end design of Insight Flow with iterative usability testing and improvement. The final design significantly increased user engagement and retention rates while receiving many positive feedback from users.

Take the design of Insight Flow as an example. Through extensive user research and testing, I discovered that the nature of human research inherently follows an iterative process. This iterative nature is almost unavoidable, as it aligns with the way humans progressively deepen their understanding of complex matters.

Therefore, Instead of resisting this inherent nature, it is essential to respect it and use it as a foundation, through breaking down the pain points of inefficient and time-consuming research, to shift focus to re-identify the root cause: the high complexity and disorganized findings that hinder the ability to define clear directions for subsequent steps.

To address this root cause, the design empowers users with interactive data visualization for an intuitive, customizable, dynamic research map that aligns with their unique business circumstances, vision, mission, milestones, and inspirations. By visually showing the relation of key factors, the design effectively organizes findings and reduces complexity.

It also enables the intuitive connection, inspiration, and synthesis of insights, helping the users streamline analysis at each stage, saving time, and ultimately facilitating informed decision-making.

One key challenge lies in delivering effective insights tailored to the specific circumstances, mission, vision, milestones, and inspirations of different businesses.

This is especially true for companies that are not familiar with the energy sector, and even less familiar with the complexities of the energy transition, not to mention that extracting actionable insights is further complicated by a wide range of intricate factors involved.

Winning in the MUSE Design Awards is a powerful affirmation of my design thinking and methodology.

I believe that things-developing is rarely a straightforward, linear process; instead, it unfolds in diverse, interdependent interactions with its environment —what we often describe as an ecosystem.

At its essence, designing nested loops is about respecting the inner nature of things and addressing the complexities between them. This approach requires designers to understand the relations and dynamics within the ecosystem, identify or create critical leverage points, and establish positive feedback loops that connect these leverage points for iterations and improvements.

This methodology is not only effective for designing complicated products but also beneficial for design research, enabling deeper insights into a product's role and its potential within the broader market ecosystem.

This award motivates me to continue refining, applying, and evolving this approach. Once it is fully matured, I hope to share this methodology with a broader audience for exchanging insights.

The top three favorite things about my industry (UX design) are:

1. UX practice is a journey of continuous self-growth. Each project becomes a canvas for expanding my cognitive horizons, where the interplay of analytical thinking and perceptual understanding deepen both my professional expertise and personal development.

2. The essence of UX lies in its transformative power to cultivate empathy. By immersing ourselves in diverse perspectives, we transcend our own boundaries, gaining profound insights into human behavior and its dynamic relationship with the environment, both from macro and micro perspectives.

3. As a discipline, UX design provides an exceptional practice platform to step and integrate business thinking into user experience. It challenges me to navigate between the goals of business and the needs of users, leveraging different thinking abilities to solve problems creatively and practically.

In the fields of visual arts, graphic design, architectural design, art, music, etc., Chinese culture and art possess an irreplaceable uniqueness.

When it comes to UX design, ancient Chinese dialectical philosophy—such as the idea of duality, where everything has two sides, like two sides of a coin—offers a distinctive and profound contribution to the field.

The emergence of AI has brought fundamental transformations to many industries, and integrating AI into design is undeniably a key trend for the future. In this evolving landscape, I believe future design will place greater demands on higher-level creativity, critical thinking, and the synergy between the two.

Why? AI has not only revolutionized productivity but also accelerated product development and operational cycles across industries. At the user level, this translates to rapid-changing of fundamental and deeper user needs. Since AI generates outputs based on existing data, it inherently lacks concurrent data regarding the evolving user needs. Therefore, As long as humans remain the primary audience for products, AI cannot fully replace designers.

So, the role of future UX designers will be to quickly identify these changing user needs, align them with market dynamics, and create agile and AI-era-appropriate strategies and solutions for the product. This requires designers to possess exceptional creativity rooted in comprehensive, multidimensional systemic critical thinking and a profound understanding of the inherent nature of humans. These abilities will form the foundation and driving force behind higher-level creativity.

Therefore, I believe the future of design evolution hinges not only on AI integration but, more importantly, on advancing critical thinking and creativity.

If I were a student just starting in the design field or planning to participate, my advice would be to broaden the horizons of your life as much as possible. Combine emotional perception with rational thinking, immerse yourself in diverse experiences, and reflect deeply on the people, events, and things you encounter.

Dive into the underlying causes and influencing factors behind them. After all, as a UX designer, experiencing and understanding the logic behind things is incredibly important.

I also recommend reading books on philosophy and psychology to gain a deeper understanding of the world and human nature. Design tools are constantly evolving, but a designer's ability to comprehend the complexity of the world and the people determines the ceiling of their design abilities. This is ultimately a test of one's cognitive depth. In the future, AI will radically transform our design tools, and efficiency will skyrocket.

However, profound understanding and unique perspectives—born out of deep cognition—will remain the foundation for making the right decisions amidst the tides of change. That's why exploring philosophy and psychology is vital—it equips UX designers with the depth and insight to elevate their design abilities.

Laozi and his philosophy have had a profound impact on my life. As a famous thinker and philosopher from the late Spring and Autumn period, his ideas form an essential part of rich Chinese historical and cultural heritage.

Laozi emphasized following the Dao, which means respecting the inherent natures that governs the development of all things. His dialectical philosophy highlights the duality of existence, where opposing yet complementary aspects coexist as a natural and permanent state of being.

His profound ideas have had a significant impact on both my life and career, as they illustrate how elements within an ecosystem interact, influence, and transform one another.

Great design—particularly in UX design, strategy design, service design, and product design—is rooted in understanding and respecting the inherent nature of changes and interactions. It’s about creating the proper conditions to solve problems and achieve objectives that are in alignment with these inherent natures. This philosophy is also the key to my winning design— Insight Flow: Iterative Research Solution Empowered by AI.