Hello, I'm Alex.
I'm a product leader, strategist
and designer of everyday interactions.
Profile

Product Design, Strategy & Team Leader
Alex has been shipping consumer-ready and enterprise-grade software from concept to implementation for the last 10+ years. Alex is a product designer & strategist that thrives in finding clarity in complex problems that exist outside of typical processes or frameworks.
Alex is a strong leader, mentor, coach and educator who inspires individuals and manages teams to produce their best work.

Summary
years of design production
Design systems, prototyping, beta testing, production, agile methodology, user acceptance testing, product launch & optimization
years of product leadership & strategy
Designed with Fortune 500 companies to research, strategize, produce and deliver consumer & enterprise-grade digital products
years of design team management
Managed & resourced design teams; project allocation, culture building, coaching, internship programming, cross-department design operations
Specialties

Retail & Commerce
Integration between physical environments and digital offerings to create new in-store experiences.

Platform Design
Platform design & build to provide technological foundations for offering complex interactive experiences.

Multi-Channel Design
Integration of cohesive experiences across different devices and touch-points.

Design Leadership
Design team management, learning experiences, mentorship & coaching, and setting vision and standards for product design culture.

Product Strategy
Client workshopping, stakeholder management, user research, roadmapping, and business opportunities for novel interactive experiences.

Information Mapping
Specialize in mapping for information seeking behaviour and creation of user mental models.
Brands
Some Notable Brands Alex Has Worked With












Case-Studies

Enticing Customers to Return to Physical Marketplaces
With the convenience and digitization of online marketplaces reducing relevance to physical marketplaces, how might we entice customers to return back into the physical marketplace by leveraging their online preferences?

Bringing Awareness to Company Organizational Knowledge
How might we bring awareness to company organizational knowledge by leveraging the richness of informal interactions?
More case-studies coming soon.
Clients
AE Motion
A company that develops camping equipment for beginners and professionals.
Orange llc
A company that develops camping equipment for beginners and professionals.
meow
A company that develops camping equipment for beginners and professionals.
trace original
A company that develops camping equipment for beginners and professionals.
principles
Culture
is crafted
Designers are the craftspeople of culture.
Focusing on interactions, or the detail of artifacts, is important – but when stepping back from the details, the consistency of what is produced is a “way” for users to interact with their experiences.
Intuition
is informed
A designer's intuition is always informed.
Intuition is not a creative hunch; it is informed through years of exposure and trial & error to deeply understand cultural patterns.
A designer is always informed when making calls with their intuition. Knowledge creates confidence. Assumptions are always tested to avoid ambiguity. When unsure, data will reveal the truth – even leaps-of-faith can be tested.
Output
reflects process
The quality of creative output is a reflection of the process.
A common misconception is that design output is solely based on the individual genius ability of each designer on a team. Design output requires more than brilliant design input – the success of output is based on the quality of an organization's process to allow to mature into meaningful output.
Innovation
is design's output
Design is a problem solving approach that can output more than just beautiful things.
The same process used to create meaningful products can be applied to develop business value and technological innovation. Design is not an artifact; it is a methodical approach towards innovation.
Limitations
are the innovation
Design embraces limitations as informed constraints to deliver results.
Limitations are not the enemy – they are the conditions needed for innovation to occur. Innovation is measured in how successful output was created within the constraints of available resources.
History
Professional Timeline.
Key Experiences
Today
Returned to Toronto after graduating with an International Master of Design, Interaction Design & Innovation at National Taipei University of Technology (2022) – and ready to apply new found critical inquiry skills back into the richness of industry practice.
Actively seeking full-time, consulting or contract opportunities – open, and excited to network with other industry professionals.
Since 2019
Design consulting for organizations ranging from startups to international corporations; including the development of design systems, operations, cultural and team management structures. Independently coaching designer clients on personal and career growth.
2017 – 2019
Managed a team of design educators and teaching assistants while delivering full-time design learning programming (12-week cohorts) to adult professionals transforming their careers.
Directed and developed design learning curriculum across campuses, and managed the quality-control of design projects for up to 30 students per cohort, with high-quality output, consistent high educator rating, and successful placement rates.
2014 – 2016
Lead the product design and strategic agile build of the "Connected Mall" marketplace engagement platform (PaaS), from ideation to full implementation directly interfacing with client and leading a team of 4 designers and developers for implementation across iOS, Android, and Web channels.
2013 – 2014
Full-stack design (strategic concepts to public release) and product shipment for the world's top Fortune 500 brands ranging in healthcare, automotive, entertainment, retail & finance.
Co-developed strategic "discovery" design processes for sales team to engage new lines of business through pre-build engagements.
2012 – 2013
Project coordinator for the development of interactive content on large-scale touch media devices, including multi-touch surfaces, computer-vision applications, interactive television displays and large scale projection units.
2011
Trained under the classic design methods of the Bauhaus; graduated from Carleton University's School of Architecture & Urbanism with a Bachelor of Architectural Studies, majoring in Design.
2009 – 2012
Foray into mobile UI/UX design before formal processes, frameworks or training resources exited. Explored novel ways of visualizing user flows (Illustrator), mocking up interfaces & assets production (Photoshop), and information architecture mapping to capture implementable product concepts.
Q&A
Interview Questions Answers
Why did you pursue your Masters of Design, if you are already an established practitioner?
Professors take sabbaticals as breaks from their research work; so I thought it would be a good opportunity as a practitioner to take a break, and opt-in to the world of academia. Providing myself with space away from the hyper-speed of commercialization has allowed me to foster deeper musings on philosophy, psychology, and the future of human computer interactions.
I believe that design needs to be approached beyond just commercial production output; design is the creative process that captures humanity's hopes and dreams. I take my responsibility seriously as a designer and leader, to foster my own explorations on design philosophy through critical inquiry.
My thesis research was an exploration on how consumptive media companies promote the loss of user mental autonomy; and therefore to regain autonomy, we can leverage HCI interactions through prompting awareness toward user intention. A case-study will be available shortly to capture my research highlights.
What are some design-related topics that you're currently researching/exploring?
I’m absolutely fascinated by psychology; specifically learning psychology, behavioral psychology, and cognitive sciences. This helps me investigate human experiences one layer deeper than just interactions: such as the limits of cognitive capacity, conditions required for neurochemical release responsible for motivation, and how individuals or users construct behavioural mental models of their environments.
My interests in psychology split into three categories:
First is self-motivated behavior, with a particular interest with Ryan Deci’s Self-Determination Theory (SDT) which outlines three basic human psychological needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness.
The second is how dopamine release schedule can be controlled to affect motivation in the context of user interactions.
And finally, socio psychology in the framework of organic community building and belonging – which you can see in my work building intimate design communities via the Makeshift Collective.
What particular things do you care about when it comes to design?
As an end-to-end designer that works with high level concepts to the execution and public release of software, I care deeply about the implications of what we create. It’s one thing to build a compelling commercial experience – it’s another thing to understand how that will create cultural and behavioral shifts through larger scales of time.
I have also become fascinated with the idea of user “states” within user experiences. A user is often classified by their behavioral or "user" profile, capturing a predictive model of their preferential behaviors. However profiles don’t account for the changes in everyday interactions that are affected by different temporary “states”, such as moods, circumstances, routines, or scenarios. How might we design user experiences that accommodate to multiple user “states” rather than profiles?
And finally, I care deeply about the user well-being and how to create experiences that don't overload or fatigue users. We are working with an attention economy – and engagement has to be created meaningfully over bombarding users with notifications.
Why are you a designer? Do you have a mission?
I perceive design to be less of a vocation, more an approach to investigation that combines systems thinking with cultural investigation to produce interesting human experiences.
I care a lot about humans and their experiences – ever since I was young, I’d find myself imagining new ways for people to interact and would build new social groups, and new interactions online even with my personal acquaintances. I recently dug up an old drawing of a "digital chalkboard" concept I drew up in elementary school to reimagine how the classroom's chalkboard could increase accessibility and clarity to homework information. This value system isn’t something I learned – by living it, it radiates into everything that I do inside and outside of work.
My mission is to contribute to the cultural progression of our world through the interaction with technology, so that we can be healthier, happier, and increase well-being through community and the ability to self-author our own lives. I believe strongly that tech should help unlock human achievement, and not hinder it. Therefore there’s important ethics to always be considered behind everything that we create.
What unique value do you bring to businesses?
Many organizations seek designers when they have clear things to execute on; however, by definition this removes the process of creative exploration. I find this to be unfortunate – the skills of designers are more than ripe for contributing to innovation; but without a clear integration of autonomy and allowing innovation to trickle upward, talent becomes wasted.
I respond to this in two ways. First is to position myself as a strategic partner who can also tactically executes the mission. The value I create is in my working relationships – while the artifacts that I produce are just reflections of that. Second is to lead designers on my team in a way that allows them to celebrate autonomy, mastery, and relatedness; this allows them to have a clear sense of how to contribute to the organization’s mission.
My practice thrives on navigating unchartered territories and blank canvases with an open and enthusiastic mind; guiding my team and stakeholders through the journey of discovery and expanding possibilities for new interactions and new lines of business. I work strategically across teams; but also create highly effective systems for design teams to produce output that is not just celebrated by its users, but brings value to businesses beyond what they could have imagined themselves.
Where would you put your bet on for the future of humans and technology?
The following are a list of shifts in technology that I think will have a major impact on the future of humans and their interactions with tech. There’s definitely more, but the following are the ones I’m particularly excited about.
Applications of AI
AI Imaging – generative rapid prototyping is what I consider the first foray into collaborating with computer intelligence to produce creative works. Up until now, computers were merely tools that thrived on instruction or literal input; therefore the ability to support in the process of conceptualization can amplify the human creative ability to imagine, as creative directors over technical artists.
Meaningful Recommendations – I’m fascinated by machine learning models that allow meaningful sorting of mass content; breaking apart unique characteristics of content and meta data, overlaid with user-generated relational data (how user’s use the content) to provide meaningful experiential recommendations. Discovery is the most exciting characteristic of human exploration – and tech has amazing potential in pointing users to the right content at the right time.
Deeper Humanization
Experiential States (over User Profiles) – Humans are often oversimplified into user-models that predict universally consistent behavior. However, while "personalities" and "preferences" may remain generally consistent – moods and circumstances provide an additional layer. Humans change needs from moment to moment, to capture “mood profiles” over "user profiles" is already a step forward; the next journey is into "states" or "moments" that reflect the complexity of the human experiential condition.
Digital Well-Being – Recent concerns have been raised about the effects of consumptive media companies competing for our attention. And while technology itself is neither good nor bad, as humans we have a choice in determining if technological applications can contribute or take away from humanity.
Mass Customization – Leveraging fully digital intake workflows, robotics and 3d-printers during the manufacturing process allows for custom workflows that break from rigid operating procedures. This unlocks the ability to mass customize physical products.
Social Computing
Communities & Web3 – projects in the Web3 space are still early but incredibly promising in creating meaningful online communities surrounding non-fungible digital artifacts. Non-fungibility paves an incredibly path forward to how we exchange digital goods; opening up new possibilities to create value overlaid with our existing physical world.
Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality – AR, MR, and VR are deeply visceral way of bridging the human and digital worlds to explore new mediums for human imagination. To seamlessly connect the digital and physical world lets us focus less on the question of “what’s real” and regroup on the question “what’s possible”.
contact
Thank you for taking the time to get to know me.
It really is an honour to have you spend the time to look over my professional profile and career. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out at hello@alexmchong.ca
For a more portable format, you can check out my resume below and download a portfolio in slide-deck form.