Qinyi Yao

I’m Qinyi Yao, a digital product designer. I design tools to improve productivity, communications, and human wellbeing.

Currently, I’m a student at Art Center College of Design and graduating in April 2021.

For all the work I do, their intention can be distilled down to the following 3 goals.

Improve productivity

Good interaction design enables people to harness the power of computers for better productivity. The designer has the skills to present information and provide solutions through computers for a human to understand and operate.

Amplify voices

Medium influences opinion. It’s our nature to bias towards certain information mediums; today’s public audience is conditioned to favor specific formats more than ever. From channel of delivery to color and font, the choices in communication have impact and consequences. A designer, adequately informed in the subject matter, can differentiate the nuances in forms where others cannot, and make design choices that do justice to the substance and the voice behind.

Enhance wellbeing

Design choices should be judged on their value in broader context as much as possible. A seemingly productive design on its own can be potentially harmful when applied to real-world scenarios. The designer can make decisions that indirectly influence the user’s long-term wellbeing and contribute to the future of human-centered design.

I was always a computer nerd growing up, but good design was hardly in my sight—until I got an iPod Classic at 9. It immediately captured my fascination: the albums flow swiftly to the finger’s will, the wheel clicks at the right moment with a crisp sound, iTunes, and the daring omission of a power button. The combined hardware and software offers an extension to the finger’s movement and the user’s intention: a bicycle for the mind.

From there, I entered the world of great computers and basked in the joy of creation, empowered by well-designed software. While I enjoyed making things with the tools, it’s the possibility of making better tools for people that led me to become a designer.

Getting Ready

I’ve been living in Los Angeles for the past 4 years for school. Graduation is a few months away from now, so you are looking at a progressively updating portfolio website.

Into the Nodes

Recently, I‘ve been thinking about how exhausting it is to switch back and forth in my code editor to understand the relationships between my React components. For a modular and declarative ecosystem like this, a code editor is criminally inadequate in realizing its true potential to help build a mental model.

We are so close to a node-based, visual programming workspace, powered by the web ecosystem. I can practically see myself wiring up stateful data in the dependency tree and composing components like a layer cake...

With that, I’ve been digging into some high-level literature on the future of computing, so I can get some optimism from the unknown potential. For example, this essay from Bret Victor perfectly articulates why programming by typing is an abomination today.

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. — Somebody