Frank Chen Portfolio
Senior UX design leader for enterprise software in APAC: UX lead at The Trade Desk (2023–2026) and Oracle NetSuite (2019–2023). The homepage is one screen of positioning, four case studies and a dated career list. Each case study opens with the same header (company, role, year, skills) and names the problem he reframed, not just the screens he shipped.
Location
Somewhere on planet Earth, most likely near a laptop.
Companies
Skills
Notable
- Led UX in APAC at The Trade Desk (Sep 2023–Jul 2026, team of 3 designers) and Oracle NetSuite (Jan 2019–Sep 2023, team of 5 across Singapore and Hyderabad)
- Led the team behind DSTA's "My NS Buddy", a chatbot prototype for Singapore national servicemen that was trialled in 2017 and covered by Mothership and MINDEF's Pioneer magazine
- International Design Playbook adopted by five NetSuite product teams across APAC, LATAM and EMEA
What makes it work
A breakdown of the choices that make this portfolio stand out.
Case studies that lead with a reframed problem
The Japan tax case study turns a request to automate tax filing into a question about trust: how to automate while letting accountants who check every row in pencil keep confidence in the figures. The AI product-selection study rejects two AI concepts because they added steps without enough user value. The thinking is the deliverable.
Honest about what users overruled
In testing, Japanese accountants preferred to see the return exactly as it looks on paper, even though his design reduced the chance of error. He shipped their preference and says so: "a design optimised to reduce errors isn't necessarily the one users will trust." Admitting the reversal reads as more senior than a clean success story.
Leadership shown through adoption numbers
The International Design Playbook study measures success by use, not output: five product teams across APAC, LATAM and EMEA adopted it, brown-bag sessions reached about 30 practitioners, and it grew to 40 topics. For a manager-level portfolio, that is proof of influence beyond his own team.
What UX Designers can take from this
Specific, actionable tips to apply to your own portfolio — no generic advice.
Open every case study with the same short header (company, role, year, skills) so a hiring manager can scan your scope in seconds.
Show the moment you reframed the brief. The reframed problem is often more convincing than the final UI.
If users overruled your design, say so and say what you learned. It signals judgement, not weakness.
Case studies
Four case studies from enterprise products in APAC: two at The Trade Desk, two at Oracle NetSuite. Each one names what he changed about the brief, and the most useful detail is where he admits users overruled him.
Guiding AI Exploration for Product Selection
Advertisers build product lists from retailers' catalogs, which can hold millions of products, before using retail purchase data. Filters handled structured needs such as brand or price, but concepts like "back-to-school" meant adding products by hand. Asked by Data Science to explore how AI could help, he grounded the work in existing research and set criteria: an idea had to justify asking users to change how they worked.
It shows restraint with AI: evaluation criteria defined before ideation, and a documented decision not to replace predictable filters with probabilistic results.
Evaluation criteria set before brainstorming, not after
Two AI concepts explicitly rejected, with reasons
AI reserved for requirements filters cannot express
Turning an MVP into a Coherent Platform (OpenTTD)
OpenTTD was a developer-centric companion to The Trade Desk's campaign platform, serving advertisers, data providers and inventory suppliers. The product director planned UX support app by app. He proposed a one-week intensive instead, and identified two app archetypes (content-heavy and task-based) plus platform-level needs the MVP had skipped.
He changed how the team worked, not just what it shipped, by persuading a product director to invest in platform UX before design debt piled up.
One-week intensive reframed app-by-app support into platform design
Two app archetypes became shared templates
Design system grew alongside each new app
Designing for Trust in Tax Automation in Japan
Japan's 2019 tiered consumption tax made the return form more complex, and the brief was to automate more of it. Research with local tax experts showed accountants print transaction lists and tick off each one in pencil. He reframed the problem around trust: automation only saves time if accountants trust the figures it produces.
Cultural research turned directly into interaction design, including shipping the version users trusted over the one he had optimised.
Pencil-and-paper checking translated into a mark-as-reviewed control
Drill-down from every system-generated figure to its transactions
Shipped the layout users trusted over the one that reduced errors
International Design Playbook
Product teams treated "global ready" as a translation problem, and shared design-system components hardcoded regional assumptions such as date and address formats. He pitched lightweight guidelines built for adoption: a high-level checklist with drill-down pages, short content and visual examples. He wrote most of it himself and ran brown-bag sessions across time zones.
It is leadership measured by adoption rather than output: research into how teams actually find guidance shaped the format, and he shipped early and iterated.
Success defined as adoption, not documentation
Progressive disclosure: checklist first, detail on demand
Five teams across three regions, 40 topics
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