Andi Zhou

My UX skills have sharpened since the previous year, which led me become a Senior UI/UX Designer in the beginning of 2020.

The pandemic gave us a chance to plan for next generation products. For me, as a designer, the design challenge is not only for small add-ons in an existing project (e.g. one to address emerging deferral needs due to the pandemic), but also designing new systems from scratch.

In the development side, our team started working with the new ASP.NET Blazor framework for the new sites. Still also doing work as a developer, I taught myself the framework and am continuing to develop front-ends as part of the team.

I started an internship as a Front-End Developer at Ascentium Capital LLC in June 2018, where I built out User Interfaces for internal websites using Bootstrap, CSS3, JavaScript, and C# ASP.NET MVC.

6 months later, I became a full-time Software Engineer. Thanks to the magic of working in a small team, my job also went beyond from just "front-end": I did UX design and UI design for new features with Adobe XD （mostly), Illustrator (for icons), and InVision (Freehand); I also wrote SQL Server scripts and middleware code when developing features for our internal systems.

I enjoyed doing development and UX at the same time. That's exactly what I have been pursuing for my career path.

👩‍🎓 I graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a Master's in Information Science in May 2018, where my course work and research focused on usability study (user research), web development technologies, and UX design.

👩‍💼 Before graduate school, I worked as a Product Manager in a Chinese Internet company, where I did a lot of user requirement analysis, prototyping with Axure, and coordinating between the design and technical teams during projects.

👩‍💻 I earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Software Engineering in 2013 from Nanjing University (China), where I learned and did lots of programming with Java.