Yingrui Chen Portfolio
Cross-disciplinary product designer (architecture background) whose site pairs a personal values statement with case studies spanning a travel app, a Bosch UX internship, and a social-innovation service design project.
Location
Berlin
Companies
Credentials
- Politecnico di Milano — Master's Degree, Product Service System Design
- The Oslo School of Architecture and Design — Erasmus exchange, Interaction Design
- Aalto University — Summer school, Radical Creativity
Skills
Notable
- Exhibition curator at Politecnico di Milano — 'Uncertain Times 2037'
- Medium article linked in her portfolio highlights: 'The role of service design in preventing Machine Learning bias' (Mar 2022, published under Marzia Mortati's account)
What makes it work
A breakdown of the choices that make this portfolio stand out.
A stated design philosophy as its own homepage section
Rather than opening straight into project thumbnails, the site includes a distinct "About" block built around three named principles — Empathy First, Think Bigger, Dare To Pivot — each with a short paragraph, plus an explicit note that she moved "from architecture to UX design." Naming a personal design philosophy up front, before any case study, is a deliberate framing choice most portfolios skip.
Case studies span consumer, enterprise, and social-impact work
The project set behind the homepage links a genuine range: "Multidimensional News Reading Feature for VG" (UX Design, User Research), "A Travel Partner App for Reliable Connections" (Travmates — UI Design, Design System), "Optimizing Bosch Building Technology Experience" (UX Internship), and "Community Resilience Driven by Service Design" (Service Design, Social Innovation) — plus a work-in-progress automotive AI redesign. Each card is pre-tagged with its own discipline pairing (UX Design + User Research, UI Design + Design System), which doubles as a quick-scan skills index.
Curated external writing as "Other Highlights"
Below the About section, a short "Other Highlights" list links out to a Medium article she's associated with on service design and ML bias, and to an exhibition she curated at Politecnico di Milano ("Uncertain Times 2037") — surfacing thought-leadership and curatorial work alongside client project case studies, not just shipped screens.
A bold, minimal closing CTA
The page ends on a full-width black section with oversized white type reading "LET'S MAKE GREAT PRODUCTS" and a single contact button — a clean, confident close that mirrors the restraint of the values section rather than a busy contact form.
What Product Designers can take from this
Specific, actionable tips to apply to your own portfolio — no generic advice.
Consider giving your design philosophy its own short, named-principles section (two or three values, one paragraph each) rather than folding it into a generic "About me" paragraph — it reads as more intentional.
Tag each case study card with its specific discipline pairing (UX Design + User Research, UI Design + Design System) rather than a single generic "Product Design" label — it functions as a scannable skills index across your whole project list.
If you've curated an exhibition, written for an outside publication, or contributed to someone else's piece, surface it in a lightweight "highlights" list — it shows range beyond client deliverables.
A cross-disciplinary academic background (architecture, psychology, engineering) is worth naming explicitly and early — it's the fastest way to differentiate from portfolios with identical design-school training.
Close your homepage on one confident, oversized statement and a single CTA rather than a multi-field contact form — it's a stronger final impression when the rest of the page is already restrained.
Case studies
Discipline pairings label every card — UX Design + User Research, Service Design + Social Innovation — and one card simply admits it’s WIP. The range Yingrui Chen shows, from a Bosch internship to community-resilience service design, reads as a skills index before a single case study opens.
Optimizing Bosch Building Technology Experience (UX Internship)
A 16-week UX internship on Bosch's BT/UXD team in Munich, covering six projects plus side projects. The case study details three. First, an omnichannel approach and guidelines to raise response to the ASA customer-satisfaction survey. Second, two features for the all-in-one MyBosch Portal (service-ticket requests and an emergency action plan). Third, coordinating Chinese and German UX teams to localise the PAEDUIO public-address system. It also covers a moderated cognitive walkthrough on the DICENTIS conference system's voting experience and a co-design 'Value Card' workshop tool.
Enterprise B2B UX across several products, with named collaborators and stakeholders per project and candid takeaways about B2B versus B2C design and about accessibility (contrast and states on the conference-voting UI).
16-week internship spanning six projects, each tagged by discipline (research, IA/prototyping, usability testing, visual design)
Cross-border coordination between Chinese and German UX teams on PAEDUIO
Accessibility called out concretely: voting-button colour, contrast and state prompts
Candid reflection on incremental vs. radical ideas as an intern
QuBì Impasta: Community Resilience Driven by Service Design
A 14-week team project for QuBì, a Milan non-profit network fighting child poverty through participatory governance. It had lost Cariplo Foundation support because stakeholders participated unevenly. After a mid-term pivot, the team moved from proposing solutions to enabling the network to assess itself. Impasta pairs a 15-question self-assessment on five redesigned Community of Practice dimensions with a hand-drawn radar-chart consensus poster, a 'Cookbook' guide, and ten action-plan templates. Her listed roles: value proposition, boundary object and toolkit design, ecosystem and business canvas.
Service design at systems level — stakeholders, funding, municipality — rather than screens. It shows a documented pivot backed by evidence and credits the team by name.
Pivot after mid-term review: from ready-made solutions to self-assessment and action plans
Phygital touchpoints: online self-assessment, hand-drawn radar-chart poster, Cookbook booklet
Threshold design lets groups skip steps based on scores, reducing cognitive load
Business-viability section addresses why the funder would re-engage
Local Voices: Multidimensional News Reading Feature for VG
A solo student project at AHO during her Erasmus exchange, with VG (Norway's largest newspaper) as client. The starting point: VG's daily users aged 15–24 fell from 104,327 to 52,655 over 2022. Scoping to strike coverage (the LO–NHO wage dispute), she interviewed young readers and designed 'Local Voices', which lets readers post first-hand experiences alongside the news while keeping media authority intact.
It shows problem decomposition from a real business metric, deliberate scoping under time pressure (re-prioritising with four weeks left), and a thoughtful answer to a real tension between engagement and editorial credibility.
Anchored in a stated audience decline: 15–24 daily users 104,327 → 52,655 in 2022
Scoped to one news type (strikes) where authority and public expression both matter
4 rounds of moderated tests shaped the final design
Reflection names the balance between client caution and innovation
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