SUMMARY

• User experience designer and usability professional with hands on UI and web development skills;
• Passionate in making software and web sites usable through user centered design approaches;
• Ability to plan and establish front end development processes;

SKILL SET

• Visual and graphical design with proficiency in graphics applications: Corel Graphics Suite, Adobe CS3/Fireworks/Flash;
• Industrial experience in usability engineering techniques and processes;
• ser interaction design at both high level (e.g. overall architecture design) and low level (e.g. scenario based use cases);
• xtensive use and experience in web development environment using tools such as Adobe CS3/Dreamweaver or terminal editors available on Unix/Linux.
• Hands on experience for s erver side / client side development technique - HTML, PHP, MySQL, AJAX and JavaScript;
• Experienced in creating XHTML and CSS 2.0 validated document and awareness of accessibility issues;
• Education and academic background in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and input research;
• Strong verbal and written communication skills. Good at technical problem-solving . Pleasant, mature, fast-learning and self-motivated.
• Wide scope of pervious experiences across different disciplines.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Blue Coat Systems Canada Inc., Waterloo, Ontario September 2007 - Present

User Experience Designer

Responsibilities range from designing software information architecture to setting up UI standard and detailed visual design;

Exchange Solutions Inc., Toronto, Ontario March 2007 - July 2007

UI / User Experience Designer

Primary functions at ESI are to bring usability to product design process and to develop software mockups and prototypes at different levels of details (fidelities). During this period I have performed the following:

• Software UI evaluation and debugging – reported and fixed UI issues. Redesigned user interface to improve user experience;
• Lead the creation of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) coding style guide for the UI team to enforce compliance of Web 2.0 and CSS level 2 compliance;
• Lead design of UI team intranet information structure;
• Lead the conceptual UI design for several internal reporting portal and new product;
• Participated in the creation and lead the usability evaluation of product training manuals and configuration guide;
• Initiated and carried out on-going, bi-weekly usability surveys and polls that lead to UI/usability issues redesign and resolution for the software.
• Designed and conducted in-house user evaluations against different designs;
• Participated in use case study for new product.
• Wrote a company usability plan "User Experience Design at ESI" for its long term usability testing and budget planning.
• Gave a company seminar on usability testing and designing for better user experience.
• Conducted interviews with client team to have discovered user experience issues in the software;

Statistics Canada, April 2006 - August 2006

Census Staff, Census 2006

• Census Help Centre. Work at Census Help Centre to answer questions and completing census questionnaires for the Chinese community in Ottawa central area who have various difficulties including language barrier.
• Census 2006 Enumerator. Conduct Non-Responsive Follow-Up (NRFU) after Census Day (May 16, 2006). Job responsibilities include telephone interviews and field visits, answer respondent questions, complete and collect census forms and report to crew leader.

Jinitech Inc. Ottawa, Ontario 2005 - 2007

User Experience Designer & Web Master

• Responsible for creating and maintaining company's web site;
• Also responsible for product quality assurance and product user interface design.

HFE Consulting, LLC., East Brunswick, NJ 2003 - 2006

Usability Consultant and Web Designer

• Provide web site design, update and maintenance services to clients.
• Provide usability consulting services to clients.
• Design and maintain company web site.

MODEL Technologies, Inc., Ottawa, Ontario 2003 - 2006

Web Designer & Web Master

• Designing and maintaining the company's web site (http://www.model.ca).
• Designing online demo system ( Flash and HTML ) for the company's core product - ContextPortal for Windows and ContextPortal for Outlook.

Corel Corporation, Ottawa, Ontario Jan. 2000 - Dec. 2001

Usability Engineer

Supported Corel's product teams to ensure product consistency and usability.

• Conducted formal and informal usability testing on product prototypes resulted in significant cost reduction in product development. The tools and techniques used included:
• • Focus groups for user needs assessment and concept validation;
  • Web-based surveys and interviews;
  • Terminology and menu grouping design through card sort;
  • Heuristic evaluation, remote tests and lab tests with users for prototype evaluation, design, concept validation and product design;
  • Low to mid fidelity paper prototyping for design validation;
  • "Usability bash" - a quick turn around usability testing using developer and designers as testers and moderated by usability specialists.
• Conducting telephone interviews for market research and customer relations
• Worked with training department to develop training materials
• Maintained software and hardware in the usability lab and set up labs for usability testing
• Provided supervision to three usability interns in the usability lab
• Maintained a group intranet web site

Cadabra Design Automation, Ottawa, Ontario 1998 - 1999

Software Developer

Responsible for user interface design, software testing and debugging and writing user interface guidelines.

• Designed and redesigned more than 50% of interface dialogs for the company's core product - Classic SC - an EDA tool for transistor layout - to either address the design change request or to improve the user interface usability.
• Participated in writing a graphical user interface design guideline for development teams

University of Guelph, 1995 - 1998

Graduate Research Assistant

Research projects and accomplishments:

• Designed a high performance soft keyboard for pen-based mobile devices as M. Sc. thesis project. Conducted a formal longitudinal usability testing to demonstrate that the keyboard supports text entry speed 35% faster than the traditional keyboard layout.
• Conducted a series input device usability tests on mice and trackballs. The results were documented in industry reports submitted to Logitech Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
• Conducted a series of usability tests on input software such as soft keyboard, gesture input methodology and hand writing recognition.. Research papers were published at Behaviour & Information Technology, Graphics Interface conference and CHI conference.
  

OTHER EXPERIENCES

• City of Ottawa municipal election deputy returning officer (2006)
• Freelance Web designer (see portfolio).
• Webmaster (1996 - present ) Guelph Chinese Students and Scholars Association
• List owner (Lsoft listserv) (1996 - present );
• City of Ottawa municipal election senior returning officer (2003);
• Race Crew, National Capital Race Weekends (1999, 2000, 2001);
• City of Ottawa Spring Cleanup (2000);
• Guelph Chinese Students and Scholars Association, Vice President (1994); President (1995)

EDUCATION/ PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS

• M.Sc. in Human-Computer Interaction with computer science minor, University of Guelph, Canada
• B.S., Isotopic Chemistry, Beijing University, Beijing, China
• ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
• CAPCHI (ACM SIGCHI Ottawa Chapter)
• OUPS (Ottawa Usability Professionals' Society)
• IRG (The Input Research Group)