about me

Hello.
My name is Vivid, I am a designer by trade and avid video games player by choice. I love connecting people with experience they can relate to (and love!) by crafting products with character and story.

I currently work as the global Head of UX at Breville. In this role, I lead, coach and scale the Breville global User Experience Design team across Sydney, Seattle and London; reporting to the Sr. Director of Design and Innovation. At the leadership level, I collaborate closely with the Chief Product Officer, CTO and the Head of Go To Market; working at the intersection of hardware, digital product design, IoT, Voice Experience, and AI to deliver meaningful customer engagement across all our product portfolios: Espresso, Beverage & Toast, Cooking and Food Preparation division.

In my first 90 days, I successfully spearheaded the adoption of an online collaboration platform (Confluence, Jira, Slack), to facilitate better, more transparent information sharing across product teams. I also advocate the adoption of Lean UX Frameworks and Agile methodology across Breville NPD (New Product Development) team for several flagship products.

My leadership and managerial responsibilities included establishing team purpose, vision and goals, creating hiring guidelines, mentoring and designing interview questions and activities.

I am a risk-taker and a curious person by nature. I love discovering different ways to experience life, especially through learning. Nothing gets my adrenaline pumping than having my assumptions validated (or invalidated) by way of empirical exploration. At any given moment. Life, after all, is a series of experiments. And to date, I've conducted my life experiments, both scholarly and professionally, in countries like Australia, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, United States, France, China, and Germany.

Finding myself in a completely foreign environment is nothing new to me. The pain of having to learn yet another new language is the kind of pain I enjoy; with the exception of learning German. Not because it was difficult, but because I cannot stand the sound of it... my apology to all German-speakers :-))

Professional experience in brief
I have more than 12 years experience in the design industry that stretch from the far east of China to the west coast of California. My passion spans across domain that involves digital storytelling, video games design, artificial intelligence, AR/VR and user experience across touch points. Prior to joining Breville, I was working for Boomworks, a UX Design firm in Sydney, as Head of Experience Design with focus on large scale UX design projects in public service domain, education & arts institute and government organisations. Before Boomworks, I worked for Atlassian in its Sydney HQ as UX Lead in Cross Platform team focusing on purchase experience for Jira, Confluence, and BitBuckets.

Before relocating to Sydney, I was based in Germany, and working as Creative Director at frog in Munich. My experience in video games design and development was honed while I was at Trigger serving in the capacity of Vice President & Creative Director in Shanghai with quarterly base in Los Angeles.

During my tenure at Trigger, in addition to my functional role as Creative Director in the company's video game division, I executed at least six movie campaigns, accounting for more than $500billions in global revenue, with three number one domestic (US) releases. Projects include District 9, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Wolverine, Toy Story 3, and The Adventure of Tintin.

Prior to joining Trigger, I had my first empirical experience as Entrepreneur by setting up my own startup. Aptly named 'Design Sans Frontieres' (DSF), we dabbled in the field of video games and interactive design working with clients in Europe and China. DSF was later acquired by Trigger, a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment USA in 2007.

Education
I have an MBA in Creative Leadership from Steinbeis Hochschule in Berlin, Germany. This is a two-year MBA programme designed specifically for people in the creative industry. The scholarship I won for the MBA helped made the decision to further my education. Read more on how I experience the MBA programme in different countries on my school blog.

Find out what I've been up to professionally on LinkedIn, or drop me an email to say hi.

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Random stuff
My reading list on GoodReads. Feel free to judge me. :)