# Stephen Liu > Design @ Visa Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/stephenliu I am a UX professional specializing in people-watching, proficient with pixel-pushing, and capable of putting stuff in web browsers. ## Work Experience ### Staff Product Designer @ Visa Jan 2022 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area I lead design efforts for products including Visa Card Metadata Manager, Click to Pay, and Visa Consumer Portal. I support design researchers and product managers on research endeavors including understanding consumer behaviors to improve Visa's API products and studying consumer and merchant preferences regarding QR payments in multiple markets. ### Senior Product Designer @ People.ai Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area I lead research and design on improvements to People.ai's admin and settings experience, including streaming onboarding to reduce the amount of steps and time necessary, updating user administration to more accurately reflect the status of our customers' instances, and improving the customization experience. I lead the design of Engagement Dashboards, a flexible, configurable, and scalable dashboard solution for AI-driven data and insights. I worked with product management to synthesize research insights into actionable requirements and objectives. I developed and tested various user interaction patterns, including filtering, sorting, and sharing. I continued to manage People.ai's design system through two rebrands, an effort to unify the look and feel between People.ai and two of its acquisitions, and a front-end migration and merger. ### Product Designer @ People.ai Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area I lead design and research efforts on new features to expand People.ai’s use cases for marketing and customer success personas, achieving a 90% retention rate over the lifetime of the marketing-oriented feature. I established research guidelines and best practices to enable other teams, including customer success and product management, to adopt user-oriented practices in customer engagements. I worked with our front-end developers to expand People.ai's component library into a design system by rebalancing iconography, defining an adaptable color ramp, fleshing out rules around variants, and aligning components with Storybook. ### UX Researcher @ Ridecell Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area I conducted qualitative, secondary, and quantitative research to support the design and development of Ridecell’s web and mobile products. I worked with product managers to research, create, and validate product use cases, and I worked with launch managers to conduct exploratory market research. I used data gathered from contextual inquiry with our customers' dispatchers and drivers in combination with business requirements to create wireframes and user flows for Ridecell's Fleet Ops product. I planed and led field research efforts and applied insights towards improving and refining the experience and interface of the product's web and mobile components. I worked with the rest of the design team to develop a design system to facilitate collaboration between our team and our clients, as well as between our team and our developers. ### UX Designer @ Ridecell Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area I worked on developing a new visual design language and interaction model for Ridecell's end-user mobile application, ideating and iterating between different aesthetic patterns and various information architectures. I also built and tested prototypes, both paper and digital, to test user flows and interactions. I defined our design process based on researching best practices to determine what would complement and improve our company's existing culture and processes. I conducted comparative and investigative research, looking into aspects of the user experience for other mobility apps and compiling a report on the history and context of jitneys in urban centers. ### Associate Designer @ IBM Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | Chicago, Illinois I investigated and designed new and refreshed features for SPSS Statistics and Modeler by communicating with customers and users to find evidence and insights to drive design decisions and by working with engineers and QA to ensure that features can be implemented as designed. I designed new default chart and table templates, as well as defined new color palettes, for SPSS Statistics. I designed, developed, and deployed a redesign for IBM's Predictive Analytics online community, which has since grown to over 20,000 visits per month. I was responsible for creating its visual and graphic assets, and I helped shape the content strategy for the community so that we could leverage the community as a user research tool. I ideated and built a proof-of-concept prototype in HTML/CSS/Javascript for a cloud-based redesign of SPSS Statistics following IBM's design language. I worked with offering management to explore the concept, generate assets for getting buy-in from other teams and managers for the project, and kick-off the project. ### Graduate Student Instructor @ University of Michigan - School of Information Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Ann Arbor, MI I lead two discussion sections while also assisting in the development of the course curriculum for an undergraduate foundations course. I was also responsible for presenting a 70-minute lecture on Intellectual Property. ### Software Design Intern @ IBM Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Austin, TX I worked with four other design interns to create a utility for the Bluemix product team; we conducted ethnography to scope our project objectives and develop empathy for the target users, defined a metaphor that would drive the interactions within the utility, and created visual mockups to test these interactions, all of which I later translated into a clickable HTML/CSS/JS prototype. I participated in a week-long ethnography exercise to understand the character of five specific environments in downtown Austin on behalf of the Watson team. ### MconneX Program Assistant @ University of Michigan, College of Engineering Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Ann Arbor, MI I edited and posted content to the MconneX website while developing Twitter- and email-based campaigns to engage with engineering alumni. I also assisted in filming and editing lectures for a Lectures on Demand video series while working with Marketing and Communications to develop a broader content strategy for MconneX's campaigns. ### CAD Librarian @ PalPilot Jan 2011 – Jan 2013 | Santa Clara, CA I created component symbols and schematics using Cadence Allegro and Design Entry per vendor and client specifications, and helped manage and maintain component libraries internal use and for clients such as Motorola Mobility, Apple Inc., and Intel MCG. I also took over as lead librarian for Motorola Mobility in July 2012 and improved library quality from 75% to 83% year-over-year. ### New Media/Graphic Design Intern @ Six Degrees Records Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | San Francisco, CA I conducted an analysis on the social media engagement of six of the label’s musicians and developed strategies for improving web presence and fan engagement that matched the musicians’ styles and demographics. I also helped manage social media accounts, artist information, and media assets for the label and some of its musicians. ### Computer Sales Assistant @ UCSD Bookstore Jan 2008 – Jan 2011 | La Jolla, CA I assisted customers in the purchase and troubleshooting of computers and other electronics. I also assisted in the creation and arrangement of product displays while assisting in the stocking of merchandise and fulfillment of special orders. ### Research Intern @ Academia Sinica, Taiwan Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 | Taipei, Taiwan I worked two other interns to evaluate the usability of the Taiwan E-Learning and Digital Archives Program website through web design and information architecture heuristics derived from a pool of Western-market and Web 2.0 websites. We then created a proof-of-concept prototype to demonstrate recommended improvements to help the program better target usability for users outside of East Asia. ### Research Assistant, Research and Development @ Taipei National University of the Arts Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 | Taipei, Taiwan I created a interactive music animation using Flash/Actionscript 2.0 for a multi-touch surface installation, as well as interactive game-like applets using Processing. I also translated portions of the Future Brilliant Interactive Lab’s website from Traditional Chinese to English. ## Education ### Master of Science (M.S.) in Information University of Michigan - School of Information Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 ### B.A. in Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts- Music UC San Diego Jan 2007 – Jan 2011 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/iamstephenliu - Portfolio: https://www.iamstephenliu.com - X: https://twitter.com/iamstephenliu - GitHub: https://github.com/iamstephenliu - Facebook: https://facebook.com/syyoliu --- Source: https://flows.cv/stephenliu JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/stephenliu/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-30