Design rarely announces what it values. More often than not, these values derive from what a system is willing to slow down for, what it treats as worthy of attention rather than efficiency. In a field increasingly shaped by automation and scale, designer experience Yifei Chen’s The work is defined by this question of attention: not what a system can process, but what a person actually feels within it.
A Carnegie Mellon-trained computer scientist turned experience designer, Chen occupies a rare position at the intersection of technical prowess and narrative sensibility. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master of Fine Arts in User Experience Design from Savannah College of Art and Design. Currently a Designer at OKX, the blockchain technology and commerce company with 120 million users worldwide, where her work spans the OKX app and Web3 wallet, Chen moves seamlessly between digital products, branding systems, visual storytelling and experimental art, unified by a persistent attention to how people feel, perceive and connect in designed environments.
Her work has won lasting international recognition. CoMove, an independently designed end-to-end mobility concept, received the Red Dot Award for Brand & Communication Design, the Good Design Award, the Creative Communication Award (Best of Best), the German Design Award Distinction, the MUSE Design Award (Gold) and honors from the Indigo, London, French, New York and International Design Awards. She also serves as a local leader for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and as a New Media Ambassador for the Service Design Network, positions that speak to her growing role in shaping discourse in the field beyond her project work.
What distinguishes Chen’s practice is not its breadth, but the coherence of its underlying concern. Every work, regardless of medium or scale, returns to the same territory: the space between what a system can process and what a person actually feels.
Redefining mobility as social infrastructure:
CoMove
CoMove, the focus of Chen’s recent work, suggests something most transportation designs don’t attempt: that a ride can be the occasion for a relationship. Conceived and executed independently as the project’s sole designer, responsible for research, strategy, visual identity, experience design, interface system and product direction, Chen reimagines urban mobility not as a logistical problem but as an untapped social canvas. Her work earned her the Red Dot Award and ten additional international design recognitions.
“Our research revealed something beyond the traditional pain points,” reflects Chen. “A desire for meaningful connection. This realization fundamentally changed the design approach from optimizing efficiency to orchestrating meetings.”
CoMove is organized around four experiential pillars, Ride, Connect, Ambiance and Discover, each shaping a different dimension of how passengers experience travel. The in-vehicle experience is based on a challenge that most designers will ignore: how a system can create the conditions for authentic conversation without designing it. Ambient-aware social prompts, shared ambience controls for lighting, temperature, and sound, and a community architecture that extends the ride into permanent relationships together treat the vehicle interior as a social environment rather than an auxiliary mode of transportation. The measure of design is not what people see on a screen but the quality of presence they feel in a shared space.
Chen’s larger conviction runs through every decision: that sensory choices are behavioral, and that color, sound, spatial composition, and material presence shape how people feel, act, and connect. CoMove’s long-term vision extends this belief to scale, towards the integration of smart cities and urban planning organized around social transport hubs.
Designing access as a human right:
I’m Arc
Where CoMove operates within a system that already touches the most people, Chen’s design leadership at Olen Arc addresses a system that consistently fails those it claims to serve. Olen Arc was designed for what didn’t exist before: a digital front door for Native and Indigenous communities, a single, centralized platform through which people could access health care, government services, and tribal resources that had long been scattered across overlapping federal, state, and local systems or simply inaccessible.
The design challenge was not only logistical but deeply relational. Rural and tribal communities must navigate overlapping benefit structures that were not built for people seeking resources, in a context where geographic isolation, cultural distance, and data sovereignty issues make conventional platform design inadequate in the first place. Chen’s approach focused on co-designing with community members directly, ensuring the experience was shaped by the people it would serve rather than imposed on them, and translating systemic complexity into a conversational, culturally informed interface that allowed people to ask for what they needed on their own terms.
The project won the inaugural Alaska AI competition, a recognition that validated the design philosophy as much as the technology: that the most important application of AI is not automation, but access. Where most platforms are built to reduce friction for people who already have power, Olen Arc was designed to remove barriers for communities that have historically excluded streamlined systems.
Chen’s practice becomes more readable at this end. The belief that the role of design is to make every person feel seen is, at CoMove, an ambition for urban connection. In Olen Arc, it is a structural demand.
The poetic mirror:
Experiments in Machine Language
Alongside her commercial work, Chen maintains a mobile practice that extends her design philosophy into critical and artistic territory, work that moves between screen-based interactive poetry and new media installation. These pieces turn the formal vocabulary of her discipline, interface conventions, system log writing, aesthetics of dysfunctions, spatial composition, against the assumptions usually served by the vocabulary.
Published as an interactive web experience, Convenience Optimization Log immerses viewers in a poem-as-system-diary overlaid on AI-generated photographs of flowering branches, the experience of encountering nature through a machine that cannot record it. Its modules process questions the system was never designed to answer: happiness, memory, the gap between a grandmother’s 30 internally memorized songs and a user’s 30,000 algorithmically shuffled tracks. An accompanying piece places the viewer within a fractured sky, surrounded by spatial typography that maps the texture of streamlined urban life: identical coffee shops, copycat skies, movement of the system it marks as invalid.
These works keep open the tension that CoMove and Olen Arc resolve, between system logic and living sensation, as a question rather than a solution. They serve as a critical mirror to Chen’s professional tools, examining what those tools assume about human experience and where those assumptions fail.
The Through Line:
Recovering what systems leave behind
In these works, Chen articulates a consistent position on experience design. At CoMove, efficiency without human warmth is a design failure. In Olen Arc, the measure of an AI system is not how much it automates, but who it ultimately lets in. In its experimental practice, the language of optimization turns against itself to reveal the cost of frictionless experience.
“I began to think of myself less as a creator of features or interfaces,” Chen wrote, “and more as an architect of experiences and relationships.”
What unites the work is not a visual style, but a philosophical orientation, which treats experience design not as a service to technological systems but as a counterweight to them. Chen designs the human layer that algorithms cannot create: the moment of connection between strangers on a shared walk, the experience of asking for help in your own language and being understood, the anxiety that occurs when a system is asked to process a question about happiness and cannot.
In it, Chen asserts her role not just as a practitioner of experience design, but as a designer who insists on taking seriously what she leaves behind.
Words by Maya Lane Editor.
