About

Ying Jiang · Product designer

Based in Vancouver, Canada

Fifteen years in, I still love this work. It solves real problems, and it keeps demanding more patience, curiosity and open-mindedness than I had yesterday.

Illustration of Ying at a desk, chin in hand, sketching next to a lamp, a stack of books and a jar of pencils.

I started in UX research while earning my master's in Interactive Arts and Technology, then moved into web front-end at an agency. From there, I designed transit and paratransit systems serving 50,000 trips a day, followed by machine-learning tooling for payment fraud at Mastercard, incident response and service intelligence at xMatters, and, most recently, enterprise device and security management at Microsoft, where my work touches hundreds of millions of devices across hundreds of thousands of organizations.

I like problems where the answer isn't obvious. I work with product and engineering to navigate ambiguity, frame the right problem, and turn technical constraints into product opportunities.

I use AI throughout my design practice, from research synthesis, brainstorming, and exploration to prototyping and production, while bringing the product thinking, judgment, and craft that AI can't.

See the work

My UX Journey

UX research: I started with a technical foundation in systems engineering, but I loved art and was drawn to the space where technology, people, and problem-solving meet. That led me to pursue an M.A.Sc. in Interactive Arts and Technology, where I researched user experience and interaction design.

Web + front-end development: Learned to build what I design, so I design with a deeper understanding of what's possible.

Enterprise product design: Transit, AI/ML, IT operations, incident response, security, and device management.

Today: Bringing research, systems thinking, technical fluency, craft, and AI together to solve complex product problems.

How I work

Think in systems. I look beyond individual screens and features to understand the relationships, patterns, and structures that make complex systems work as one coherent experience.

Start with the job. People come to get something done. They shouldn't have to understand how the system is built. I balance user needs with business goals and technical constraints.

Design for Scale. I look for reusable patterns, systems, and decisions that scale across products, teams, and evolving requirements.

Craft the whole experience. I care about interaction, visual hierarchy, language, accessibility, and the details that make an experience feel clear, intentional, and cohesive. I design for failure and recovery, not just the happy path.

Prototype to learn. I use code, AI, and design tools to explore ideas rapidly, test assumptions, and validate concepts before committing engineering resources.

Design for trust. Whether AI is involved or not, people need to understand what's happening, make informed decisions, and recover when things go wrong. AI should support judgment, not replace it.

Off the clock

Illustration of Ying playing an electric bass in front of jazz and Motown posters, an amp on the floor beside her. — **Grooving**Bass has the most influence with the least ego. I love laying down a line that carries the whole band while nobody quite notices. I picked one up the day I really heard the bass line in “Forget Me Nots.”

Illustration of Ying in a kitchen with mixing bowls, flour and a rolling pin. — **Making**Bread from scratch, soap, a chicken coop for a small and opinionated backyard flock, tomatoes grown from seed. I could buy all of it. I make it because the process is the point — DIY is my therapy.

Illustration of Ying curled up with a book beside a shelf of books. — **Reading**Books are my mental vitamins. I read because I want to live a thousand lives instead of one — other places, other times, other people’s heads. So many good books, so little time.

The drawings are mine, every one drawn by hand in Illustrator and Sketch, not prompted. So are the two posters on the wall behind the bass; they are on the Craft page too.