Clarify the target users’ needs, business goals and requirements.
2, Research & Analyze
Identify the issues and analyze competitors and references.
3, Ideate
Brainstorm user flows, personas, user stories and use cases.
4, Design
Create wireframes, prototypes, interaction flow and visual design.
5, Implement
Collaborate with engineers. Create a style guide.
6, Test
Design quality checks, collect feedback from users and iterate.
About Me
I have over ten years of professional experience as a UI/UX and Product Designer, with specialized skills in fintech, e-commerce, and localization for websites and mobile apps in both the U.S. and Japan.
I'm passionate about designing clean, elegant, and unique web interfaces aimed at bringing people joy by finding a harmonious balance between functionality and aesthetics.
I draw upon my wide-ranging design experience and international background as inspiration for suitable designs catered to a variety of markets.
I believe that design is universal, and that good design can change your life. I’m here to make your day better through my design work!
My motto: "Tackle many things proactively and never give up."
My favorites: Cats, Hiking, Biking, Baking, Gardening
QuickBooks is an accounting app that takes care of the accounting and financial management needs of small businesses.
We successfully shipped the revamped mobile app in October 2019. However, we lost 30% of mobile-first customers on the very first screen of the app. Data showed that 72% of them never saw the dashboard (the actual product).
As phase 1, we looked at ways of improving the first-time use experience to persuade new customers to subscribe by presenting them with better optimized sign-ups.
My role
I was a product designer working on visuals as part of a large cross-functional team. I participated in the entire design process from the UX research and discovery phase to the design experiment phase where I delivered the visual design, aligned with our design system.
*Note: Project currently in development and under NDA. Please contact me directly for this project.
Visa Business Intelligence App
Project Detail
A business intelligence tool to view a Visa
card's performance across the portfolio and help
clients understand insights from the data, and identify
actionable opportunities to influence future
cardholder behavior and better manage the business.
It enables clients to go from overall performance
to opportunity identification to action.
Goal
Deliver a scalable application which allows Visa and
clients to see data-driven performance and
opportunities through an engaging self-service
experience.
*Note: Project is under NDA. Please contact me directly for this project.
Slice Intelligence Business Intelligence Dashboard
Project Detail
Slice Intelligence provides market research reports to help marketing or data analysts from CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods), Retailer, or Service companies. As Slice is growing rapidly and the number of report offerings is increasing, the existing design no longer satisfies sustainable business requirements. In light of this, Slice decided to redesign their web portal to better help marketing and data analysts understand their product sales. With Slice, analysts can easily see how much their company’s products have sold online and compare it directly with their competitor’s products. A number of different product and report offerings provide users with a wide range of valuable data.
Goal
Deliver the consolidated dashboard containing summary charts where we answer the question, ”Is my business healthy?” from various perspectives.
Balluun365 Social commerce platform for trade shows
Project Detail
Balluun365 is Balluun's flagship SaaS product, a social commerce platform for trade shows. On Balluun365, trade show organizers can build their own B2B marketplaces to offer new digital services for their exhibitors and attendees. Wholesale sellers and buyers in any industry and location can communicate, connect, and transact before, during, and after the show.
Goal
Create an unified platform design for consistent use across all trade shows domains.
Problem
"Scalability" - We simply couldn’t update each domain individually.
We launched the first generation of Balluun’s platform for fashion, toy, and licensing trade shows in 2012. Each trade show domain had a different interface, color scheme, and style, as well as varying ranges of functionality.
Revamping the Platform
At this point, we decided to redesign the platform with scalability in mind. Our new goal was to have every trade show in the world powered by Balluun. To make this happen, scalability is a key point to meet our business needs.
Balluun wants to:
Improve a time consuming process on update and maintanance.
Encourage partner trade show organizers to use Balluun365 as their digital marketplaces.
Challenge
”Unified Design” - Domain specific design → Single interface design
As I mentioned earlier, one of the challenges we faced was to create an unified design.
The design therefore couldn’t be industry-specific.
Solution
”Neutral” - Neutral, clean and easy-to-use design for consistent use across all trade shows.
As the design should have the ability to be easily blended into all kinds of trade show domains, I found it important to create something that was neutral, clean and easy-to-use, but not at all boring or outdated.
Process
Research
How did we get this design solution?
The art director and I started by asking user feedback from our customer support team; and then with an extensive series of interviews, testing, and research with sellers, buyers, and trade show operators to clarify each target user's needs, and to define their pain points on the existing platform.
Even though each user had different needs and issues, most of them were feeling stressed about the poor usability and outdated design.
What followed was to comb through the existing platform to identify the issues. For exapmle; Confusing user flow (the long step to sign-in), Inconsistent interface (for example, the styles of the primary and secondary buttons were mixed, each page had different spacing, etc.).
Competitive Analysis
The next stage was to analyze competitors and references. I researched the strengths and weaknesses of their designs, then discussed my findings with the team. By doing this, we realized that our team needed to polish our product and strengthen our design to differentiate ourselves from our competitors.
Ideate
We brainstormed and discussed user flow, use case, usability, and visual design. Since sellers and buyers had different expectations to achieve their goals on this platform, it was important to make sure that these individual expectations were met.
Wireframes
After multiple discussions with all the stakeholders, I started by sketching wireframes, then collaborated with the Project Manager to build high-fidelity wireframes.
V1 Mockup
I translated ideas gathered from our research and analysis into a strong, unified visual design.
V1 mockup looked okay but it was not the best. We needed to take one more step toward the best results.
Here are some changes needed;
Header:
1, Too bold, ”balluun365” is more prominent than trade show logo.
2, Light grey background is not always good on all logos.
Thumbnail:
3, Based on trend research and feedback, circle is more popular than square so user might be comfortable with circle shape.
Color:
4, Combination of blue and purple is mismatched.
Final Mockup
The key to solving our problem laid in the concept of ”Neutral”. We focused on the minimum and modern simplicity. After several iterations, we finalized the look and feel of the basic design with following styles.
Color:
Just used black, white, a few shades of grey. Purple styed to drew attention and highlighted focal elements. This combination made for a design that was neutral, minimalist, and simple, without being dull or boring.
Font:
I picked Open Sans for its easy-to-read and friendly appearance.
Usability Improvements
In our previous platform, there was a simple search bar where users got mixed results between brands and products. To solve this problem, we added a dropdown feature where users are able to select either all, brands, or products when searching.
Style Guide
Responsive Design
Analytics
Result
We successfully established three more partnerships with trade show organizers, and more than doubled our numbers of exhibiting and attending companies.
Balluun365 - Mobile App Social commerce platform for trade shows
Project Detail
The mobile version started a little bit after our basic design for website was finalized.
(Balluun365 is a social commerce platform for trade shows where buyers and sellers can create their own digital marketplaces and connect online anytime.)
Goal
Our biggest goal here was to give users a seamless experience across web and mobile apps.
User Research
In order to better understand users’ behavior, we sent out an online survey to our users (buyers and sellers).
Based on this survey, we realized most of our users aim to use a mobile app for a social media. Sellers who want to upload their products from the mobile app are less than 5%. So, we only focused on a shopping and social networking experience without a managing products function (which only sellers need.)
Sketch
After we discussed our findings though user research, I quickly sketched the user story to understand how our users act with the mobile app before/during/after the show, and created the initial idea sketch.
Wireframe
Visual Design
Social feed flow
iPad
ToysRus E-commerce Website for the Japanese Market
Project Detail
Toys ”R” Us sells a variety of toy and entertainment products through their retail locations worldwide and online. They asked btrax to redesign the Japanese e-commerce site in order to promote their site in Japan and increase conversion rate. We needed to redesign the website while keeping their friendly branding. We uncluttered the overall presentation, increased the ease of browsing, discovering, making wish lists, and created a seamless experience between desktop and mobile.
Problems
Overwhelmed with information with a lot of contrasting colors and banners.
Not clear what information is important and what the best products are.
Poor usability.
Goals
Optimize the site for the local Japanese market.
Redesign the user interface to be cleaner, more friendly, fun and useful as well as brand appropriate for easy shopping for new and repeat users.
Improve user flow especially for checkout and registration.
Client Return
Improvement on all metrics related to customer experience for Toys ”R” Us and Babies ”R” Us
Increased site traffic by 83%
Boosted new visitors by 27%
Grew mobile revenue by 3x
Increased overall revenue per user by 1.5x
Better positioned Toys ”R” Us e-commerce against growing competitors in Japan
Use this area of the page to describe your project. The icon above is part of a free icon set by Flat Icons. On their website, you can download their free set with 16 icons, or you can purchase the entire set with 146 icons for only $12!
Use this area of the page to describe your project. The icon above is part of a free icon set by Flat Icons. On their website, you can download their free set with 16 icons, or you can purchase the entire set with 146 icons for only $12!
