ABOUT ME

Call me Yen.

Product designer since 2011. Healthcare-focused since 2021. The last five years have taken me from clinical decision support at MDCalc, to decentralized trials at Medable, to leading immunization design at Walgreens. The throughline: I design for the people who deliver and receive care.

A designer for fourteen years. A healthcare designer by choice. A mom of four always.

An Asian woman in a large parka in front of snow covered mountains.

My Journey

I've been designing software since 2011, first by teaching myself Photoshop as a kid, then building websites and apps through college, then landing the internship that turned into my first design role.

The first decade of my career was a fast education in startups: I went from founding designer to design leader, scaled teams, and learned how to ship products in environments where everything is on fire and nothing is documented.

The turn toward healthcare
In 2021, I made a deliberate move into healthcare. It wasn't a sudden swerve. It was the domain I'd quietly been circling for years, and once I started designing for clinicians and patients, I knew I'd found the work I wanted to do for the rest of my career.

Since then I've designed some interesting features at MDCalc, and decentralized trial platforms at Medable. I currently lead design for Walgreens' immunization platform, one of the largest vaccine delivery operations in the country.

Why healthcare
The users in healthcare are exhausted. The workflows are fragmented. The stakes are real. Designing well in this space isn't about aesthetic polish, it's about whether the right thing happens at the right time for the right person. That's the work I want to spend my career on.

My Values

1. The user at 2 a.m.
Healthcare software gets used by people in their hardest hours: the clinician charting after a 14-hour shift, the patient figuring out a trial protocol alone at the kitchen table, the pharmacist running a Saturday flu clinic. That's who I design for. Not the demo audience. Not the stakeholder in the room. The person on the other end of the screen when no one else is looking.

2. Evidence over opinion
I'd rather run a five-minute usability test than win a fifty-minute debate. In healthcare, opinions are expensive and assumptions are dangerous. The fastest way to make a good decision is to put the work in front of a real user and watch what happens.

‍3. In it for the long haul
Healthcare is slow. Trust is earned. The best products in this space were built by people who stayed long enough to learn the domain deeply and ship work that compounds. I'm not here for the title or the trend. I'm here for the work, for the long run.
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