Episode #77: Overcoming Barriers in UX with Jessie Chen

Jessie Chen began her design journey in China with a bachelor's degree in interior design. She moved to the United States in 2008 to pursue a dream of becoming a children's book illustrator and completed an MFA in illustration in San Francisco. After graduate school, she worked as a 2D artist at a mobile social game company. A year later, she returned to school for website design and new media, which opened a route into user experience design.

An agency internship in 2013 became a pivotal step. During Jessie's earlier roles, her contribution was concentrated in the develop and deliver portions of the double diamond process. She was doing much of the pixel-level execution but had less influence over discovery and problem definition. As she became more senior, her work expanded across the whole process, including product vision, strategy, and roadmaps. She later joined Facebook and then Autodesk, where she works as a principal UX designer.

What you'll learn

• Why junior designers should speak before they feel senior enough

• How a design-review step can catch UI issues before code review

• Why engineers need context about the problem, evidence, and design iterations

• How focused expertise can help an early-career designer stand out

• How Jessie turned a language barrier into a reason to lead visibly

Lead through communication, not title

Jessie would tell her younger self not to be afraid to lead. Junior practitioners can assume their perspective carries less weight, then withhold useful observations. She notes that the loudest voice can still dominate a room, so speaking up about conflict and sharing a point of view can materially affect career growth. Leadership does not need to wait for a principal title.

Communication becomes more important as a designer's scope grows. Jessie's days span roadmap and timeline discussions, sprint grooming and planning with engineering, feature requests, interaction design in Figma, and an internal design education program. She identifies curiosity, creativity, communication, and leadership as core qualities. The phrase that stays with her is to learn like a junior and lead like a senior: keep a growth mindset while accepting responsibility for moving work forward.

For junior designers, she recommends developing problem-solving and collaboration alongside visual craft. It can help to become notably strong in one area, such as prototyping or animation, rather than trying to master everything at once. In a large company, however, craft alone is insufficient. Designers must know when to involve stakeholders, how to influence them, and how to make the value of the work visible.

Bring engineering into the design process earlier

Jessie encountered UI bugs that were discovered only after code review. Each correction then required another loop through coding, review, and testing. Her response was small but concrete: add a design-review column to the engineering workflow and make that review mandatory before code review. Catching discrepancies earlier significantly reduced turnaround time for UI fixes.

She also invites the engineering team into project kickoffs. Along with product and research partners, she presents the problem statement, expected impact, user research, and design iterations. Engineers receive the reasoning behind the initiative instead of only a finished specification. That context supports collaboration and gives the team a shared account of how decisions were reached.

Team culture matters too. Jessie created a Slack workflow called Things to Celebrate so colleagues could award gold stars, explain the contribution, and connect it to team values. The public recognition helped engineers acknowledge one another and strengthened inclusion, particularly for contractors who might otherwise feel less connected to the team.

Turn a barrier into visible practice

Born and raised in China, Jessie moved to the United States in her early twenties. She experienced imposter syndrome around speaking, networking, and expressing opinions in a second language. Her turning point was choosing to embrace her accent and the knowledge gaps that came from growing up in another country.

That decision did not remove the challenge. It changed what she did with it. Jessie leads an educational program, approaches speakers she has not met, writes design articles, mentors through external programs, and accepts opportunities that stretch her communication. By leading visibly, she can also show other immigrant colleagues that fluency anxiety does not disqualify them from leadership.

Listen to Jessie Chen explain her career transition, engineering collaboration, mentorship, and approach to language barriers: Listen to Episode #77.