About me

Hello! My name is Samson (Yushan) Liu, and I am a UI/UX Designer and Engineer with 5 years of professional experience in UI/UX design and frontend development. I have a proven track record of delivering innovative design solutions and building robust front-end applications. I am dedicated to helping businesses build better UI/UX, enhancing both functionality and user satisfaction.

In design, I excel in user research, prototyping, and creating both low and high-fidelity wireframes and visual design. On the development side, I am adept at implementing slick and impactful UIs using React and Angular, and I built this website with Svelte! My curiosity about how things work led me to delve deeply into programming. As a designer, I have written my own malloc in C and reasoned through assembly, which I believe is quite rare!

While you can browse through my professional projects on this website, here are some relevant courses I took at Carnegie Mellon:

• Design Human-Centered Software
• Interaction Design Overview
• Data Visualization
• Principles of Imperative Programming
• Introduction to Computer Systems
• Web Application Development

My dual expertise in design and engineering allows me to create seamless workflows and solve UX challenges effectively. In my professional experience, I have tackled dashboard redesigns, visual programming, and Electron app designs. I have introduced page performance improvements, transformed broken systems into functional ones, and enhanced user efficiency by up to 80%.

About the site

2024/7:

Finally rebuilt the site in Svelte! I've heard great things about it and wanted to try it out. Compared to React or Angular, I indeed like Svelte and SvelteKit better. The setup is smooth; Server-side rendering comes out of the box. Scoped styling, and easy animation and state management are a breeze. Some things I found that no one uses any more:

• Carousels. Based on Hotjar metrics, carousels are rarely used, which aligns with many UX posts that discourage their use. I replaced many but kept some for non-critical images to save screen real estate.
• Hotjar itself. It's now on the uBlock list and can hurt performance
• Contact forms. I just wanted to build one since I've seen so many as a kid. People prefer not filling out forms just to contact someone. Plus, you don't get a send receipt.

2022/9:

With professional experience under my belt, my pages now contain sensitive data. So I privitized the repo, converted the site to a web app running on Express and Node.js, and added an email server for a contact form. Considered rewriting in React with SSR (Next.js or Gatsby), but the setup effort outweighed the benefits for a static portfolio site.

Added Hotjar heatmap for fun. One day I want to rewrite the pages in a framework that I'm not familiar with like Svelte and use a better styling solution.

2019/10:

Built the site as a static website served on GitHub Pages. The HTML is dated and styled with plain CSS. It was a lot of work, but I'm quite pleased with the results. Isotope is a lot of fun!