Nelson Leung — Design Director
Creative software designer making interfaces for websites and applications
Profile
Over the past 15+ years, I have partnered with ambitious studios, start-ups and companies to create beautiful, meaningful interfaces. Whether with large organizations on multi-year endeavours or quick prototypes for small and agile teams, I craft with care, speed and precision.
I lead like a player-coach, holding strategy, research insight and execution in balance. Whether shipping or testing, I thrive working alongside technical partners.
I enjoy being a dad and husband more than anything else. I used to make electronic music, but these days, I spend more time with a Taylor acoustic guitar than with Korg synths. I'm a wannabe cinematographer, making short movies most will never see. Cooking, lawn care, and woodworking fill my YouTube recommendations.
Roles
- DVXD as a Design Director
- Thoughtworks as a Senior Design Lead
- Huge Inc. as a as a Design Lead
- Teehan+Lax as a Creative Lead
Notable Clients
- Meta Hardware
- Youtube Gaming
- Medium
- Mountain Equipment Coop
- Indigo
- Scotiabank
- Telus
- RBC Ventures
Capabilities
- Experience Design
- Design Direction
- Interface Design
- Conceptual Design
- Prototyping
- Design Systems
- Design Strategy
- User Research
Willow
Product design for Canada's first real estate trading platform
Reflection
Willow makes real estate investment accessible for all. We designed Canada's first fractional real estate exchange.
It was one of the rare instances in my career where brand, product, experience, and technology were in tight collaboration. My favourite projects are small teams, ambitious founders, apparent market gaps, and clear user experience opportunities.
We did the classical UX activities, journey mapping, archetypes, and user stories, all of which formed the foundation of the product. Still, overall, the use cases were straightforward – investors need to analyze the value of properties and execute trades. It was a compelling challenge designing a financial dashboard, real-estate listing and securities trading platform all rolled into one.
There were enough regulatory constraints and transaction flows to make our heads swim. Knowing the market is for first-time and institutional investors, the platform had to feel approachable and, at other times, powerful. The challenge was to design an experience that felt familiar to seasoned securities traders but still accessible to the casual investor.
Collaborators
Derek Vaz, Josiah Bilagot, Steph Coleman, Setareh Shams + DVXD
Indigo
E-commerce experience concept and design system for Canada's largest book retailer
Reflection
Indigo partnered with DVXD to created a foundational design system to enable internal teams to cut time to deployment and unlock future initiatives.
Indigo is one of Canada's premiere retail brands, and I welcomed the opportunity to work on a project with such a broad appeal. However, experience design was only one facet of a more extensive transformation. Behind the scenes, Indigo's e-commerce stack needed to catch up to its competitors and modernize its entire stack. The overhaul made us rethink how products could be displayed, interacted with and merchandised.
Our team dreamed up and prototyped novel interactions, which we tested with real customers. We developed the ones with solid signals and designed a North Star concept experience. There are many established patterns in e-commerce. Optimization is the name of the game. But, swing too far in that direction, and you have a soulless experience. Our challenge was to introduce innovative ways to shop without hurting conversion.
The result represents a 'more intentional shopping experience' – more prominent imagery, generous spacing, and focused attention stand in contrast to the typical frenetic, high-density merchandising. Working on a design system that hooks into a Salesforce implementation is challenging. We did our best to create the foundation, but the champs at Indigo's internal design team brought it over the line.
Collaborators
Derek Vaz, Josiah Bilagot, Amos Marsters + DVXD, Diogo Akio
Meta Portal
Product and design for Meta's first hardware device
Reflection
As part of Meta’s first entry into hardware, I contributed to early concepts for Portal TV and the first version of Portal. The team at Connected helped develop experience design Portal’s operating system and resting states.
I can't speak much about this one with NDAs and all, but with Meta's Portal products discontinued, there is some leeway. The Connected team worked closely with Meta's hardware division, then dubbed Facebook Building8, to design concepts for what would eventually be their line of in-home calling devices.
Meta bet that, given the opportunity, people would shift their behaviour from occasional video calls to on-all-the-time ones. The technology and hardware gave people a persistent window into each other's homes, hence the name 'portal.' A new platform required a new interaction model to accommodate this new behaviour.
My team spent months on-site collaborating with Meta designers and engineers to create, validate and invalidate core device functions. The most exciting part was working alongside the industrial design team, our concepts influencing hardware decisions and vice versa.
Clickvoyant
Core product design for users to get impactful analytics insights
Reflection
Clickvoyant is an AI data analyst for hire that enables businesses to get impactful insights. I led a team at DVXD to design the core product experience, including the critical onboarding UX.
Clickvoyant helps small business owners uncover ways to make more money by optimizing their conversion funnel. The founders discovered that many businesses have analytics but need help to make sense of the data and, worse, need help to turn insights into action.
For this project, there was no extensive discovery phase, only a deep dive into the product, uncovering how users can get the most value from it and figuring out how to get them unstuck. The solution boiled down to giving users intelligent presets.
Clickvoyant users tell the platform what they want to achieve, and the platform gives recommendations on how to get there -- no more manually parsing data.
Collaborators
Derek Vaz, Amos Marsters, Jonathan Law + DVXD
Mountain Equipment Coop
Content discovery platform to inspire Canadians to touch grass
Reflection
MEC approached Huge to create an activity discovery platform that rallied Canadians nationwide to spend more time outdoors.
MEC partnered with Huge to design, build, and launch a content discovery platform providing ideas for outdoor activities for Canadians nationwide. The engagement began by interviewing a dozen or so Canadians within MEC's target market to understand their process of planning and executing outdoor activities. We discovered that every group has one person who takes the lead, providing everyone else's know-how (and courage). We also found that people often pick activities the same way they choose a movie or music genre, primarily by the feeling they want to enjoy.
My team designed a platform allowing people to 'discover by vibe' while working closely with MEC's content team to create in-depth activity guides to fill the knowledge gap. Over four months, a cross-functional team of designers, developers and product operated in bi-weekly sprints to launch the platform serving localized content across 8 Canadian provinces.
It was a challenging project because MEC had yet to work in agile sprints, so managing their expectations was a constant battle. We had to help the client understand the build would refine over time. Adding to the stress was a national marketing campaign, meaning there could be no slippage and perfect build at launch (impossible). We were debugging for a few weeks post-launch.
Collaborators
Matthew Steenburg, Alisha Kassam, Chris Orr-Van Abbema + Huge Inc.
Chamberlain University
Experience design and optimization for healthcare professionals
Reflection
Chamberlain is North America’s largest nursing university. I led a team that enabled future nurses to move towards realizing their career goals through various digital experiences.
What began as a conversion rate optimization project became a refresh of significant portions of Chamberlain's marketing website while creating a design system for the broader digital team. A core part was leveraging their analytics team to shape the content and interactive moments around student prospect behaviour. The user journey gives us half the picture, and analytics provides the rest. Unsurprisingly, our team achieved a win rate of over 70% on variant tests while generating value in the eight figures.
Collaborators
Setareh Shams, Amos Marsters + DVXD
Telus
Design system and e-commerce platform for Telus Mobility
Reflection
I led the team at Huge in designing and developing Telus’s first design system which was rolled out all Telus online platforms.
The primary challenge for this project is how a team creates a design system that handles a dozen different platforms. The most ineffective way to create a design system, particularly for multiple platforms, is to assemble a UI kit. If we define components in isolation, we have no clue how they’ll work together; their relationship is abstracted. Instead, we first designed a vision concept, which enabled us to determine the design direction and the necessary building blocks for the system. This approach accelerates implementation because we set up a lean system by avoiding unnecessary pieces – start with a minimum foundation and add as needed.
In reality, this was a very challenging project. We learned how hard it was for content, design and development to operate on concurrent tracks. Nevertheless, fire forms teams and we become one very quickly. We established the B2B platform and then formalized the design system for other teams to consume. In retrospect, design sprints work well for building software but are less effective for marketing sites which are more content-dependent.
Collaborators
Derek Vaz, Greg Washington, Michael Wandelmaier, Jessica Lee, Leejay Dunphy + Huge Inc.
