Shannon Yao

Principal User Experience DESIGNER

Symphony Communication Services | Palo Alto CA, USA

• Led strategic design projects by developing long-term vision and design strategy for the Symphony core product.

• Partnered with user research to identify user needs and problems, sketched solutions with prototypes, tested ideas, and refined designs with data and user feedback

• Designed, prototyped, and developed elegant solutions for Symphony's desktop and web experience; collaborate with mobile counterpart to ensure coherence across platforms

• Led cross-functional workshops to identify user problems, ideate, and gain stakeholder alignment using a variety of human-centered design methodologies

• Evangelized best design practices to other designers, engineers, and product managers

Research Assistant

Georgia Institute of Technology | Atlanta, GA

• Conducted research, in collaboration with local high school teacher and other researchers, to understand how collaboration and creativity might motivate students in computer science education

• Designed and implemented a social networking site for a NSF funded project (EarSketch) that provides a platform for students to share their code and learn from each other; the site was used by both local students in a classroom setting and those that participated in a coding workshop hosted at Georgia Tech

USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN INTERN

Enterprise UX | Google | Mountain View CA, USA

• Mocked up the embedding flow for sharing Google docs in Google+ stream as a part of the feature development for Google+ for enterprise customers

• Created mockups and user scenarios to demonstrate the various aspects of managing projects in Google+ as a part of the exploration for v3 and onwards; closely collaborated with user researcher and PM throughout the process

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENGINEER IN TESTING

Microsoft | Redmond WA, USA

Windows Phone (Mar 2009 - Aug 2010)

• Played the leadership role in planning, designing, and building the automation test framework by spearheading the development process, and coordinating the various tasks across the team on both the test and the development sides

• Took ownership of the performance tests across all the photo and camera areas; delegated specific tasks to test owners and acted as a liaison between the feature team and the larger organization to ensure alignment in performance goals and expectations

Live Labs (Jan 2008 - Mar 2009)

• Worked as a developer on a cross-discipline team of 6 to build a prototype of a web-based solution for improving communication between product users and developers

Forefront Server Security (Jul 2006 - Jan 2008)

• Took ownership over the automated test suite and improved the test pass rate by 15% while reducing the amount of time required to execute a test pass by 20%

BACHELOR OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

University of Waterloo | Waterloo ON, Canada