About

Ying Jiang · Product designer

Based in Vancouver, Canada

Eighteen 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.

I started in web front-end at an agency, then spent six years on transit and paratransit systems moving 50,000 trips a day. After that, machine-learning tooling for payment fraud at Mastercard, incident response at Everbridge (xMatters), and since 2022, enterprise device and security management at Microsoft, where what I design touches hundreds of millions of devices across hundreds of thousands of organizations.

I design AI-powered features, and I use AI in my own practice to work faster and ship better.

How I work

  • Coherence at scale. The problem is never four hundred settings. It is that no two agree what a “device” is — and every release makes that worse.
  • The job, not the architecture. People come to finish something. Service boundaries are not their problem.
  • Failure states. Admins judge a console on the day something breaks, so I design the error and recovery paths before the happy path.
  • Constraints. Business goals and engineering limits are design inputs, not obstacles I discover late.
  • Responsible AI. Evidence you can check, and a way to disagree. Confidence without evidence is not intelligence.
  • Accessibility. Not a review stage. Six years designing for riders on screen readers — a failed booking meant a missed dialysis appointment.
  • Handoff. Mockup, prototype or working code — whichever settles the question fastest.
  • AI in my practice. It clears the slow work so I spend the time on judgment.

My UX journey

  1. 2022 — present

    Senior Product Designer · Microsoft

    Windows device management and enterprise security. Founding designer on Windows Autopatch, AI-powered security surfaces, and the DesignOps agent workflow used by 40+ designers.

  2. 2020 — 2022

    Senior UX Designer · Everbridge (xMatters)

    Incident response and service intelligence, plus the design system that cut handoff and fit-and-finish time by half.

  3. 2019 — 2020

    Senior UX Designer · Mastercard (Brighterion)

    The operating console for a machine-learning platform scoring 62,000 payment decisions a second.

  4. 2013 — 2019

    UX Designer · DDS Wireless

    Transit and paratransit systems for NY MTA, Pierce Transit and BC Transit. 50,000+ trips a day, ADA and WCAG 2.1 AA.

  5. 2007 — 2013

    Agency and freelance

    Front-end and interaction work at York & Chapel across 20+ client engagements, then three years freelancing. Where the habit of building what I design comes from.

Read the case studies

My path: engineering, research, then UX

A B.Sc in Management Information Systems, then system engineering at Alcatel-Lucent and Windows support at Microsoft.

After that, an M.A.Sc in Interactive Arts and Technology on two fellowships, researching user experience and interaction design. Co-author of “Making sense of group interaction in an ambient intelligent environment for physical play,” ACM TEI ’08.

UX is science and art in equal measure, which is exactly why it suits me. Underneath both is problem-solving, and that is the part I love most.

Off the clock

GroovingBass 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.”
MakingBread 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.
ReadingBooks 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.