RANDY.CH/EN
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Related Work

Five case studies.

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About

Who I am + résumé.

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Notable

Awards & recognition.

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Design Process

How I work.

Y

You

You and I.

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I’m drawn to complexity.

Order is easy to see when it’s spelled out. The systems I work on rarely are. As a UX architect in Zürich, I enjoy guiding people through them without flattening them.

Related work

Case studies

Five case studies: the problem, the decisions I made, and what came of them.

  1. 2026 – Present · Cando · ecmt AG

    Seismo Pulse

    One live picture of a crisis as it unfolds, read the same way by a control-room operator and a CEO. My current work, and the most complex system I have led on.

    Live platform · in active developmentRead case study

  2. 2026 · Cando · Swissgrid

    Swissgrid 24/7

    Making one of Switzerland's most restricted control rooms legible to all ~1,000 colleagues, without dumbing it down.

    BOSW Master · 2× Gold · Silver · BronzeRead case study

  3. 2023 · Cando · in-house venture

    mokojam

    Co-creation runs on facilitators, and enterprises never have enough of them. mokojam packages what a facilitator knows so someone doing it for the first time can still run the room.

    BOSW Silver (Innovation) · Bronze (Creativity) · Bronze (Productivity)Read case study

  4. 2020 · Bachelor project · ZHdK · ETH

    Journey to Recovery

    Children abandon sleep therapy because it is repetitive. We turned the treatment itself into a story they wanted to keep reading.

    AED Neuland Gold · SDA BA Award · ZHdK FörderpreisRead case study

  5. 2020 · ETH Focus Project · ZHdK · Jelmoli

    adero

    A delivery robot that has to be understood by strangers in an airport who were handed no instructions and asked for none.

    Functional prototype · tested at Zurich AirportRead case study

Workshops & facilitation

Rooms of specialists, taken from scattered opinions to a decision they own.

  • Upcoming · Schweizer Jugendherbergen

    Concept phaseIn progress

    In the concept phase. More once it has run.

  • 2023 · Ärzte im Zentrum · Weinfelden

    Rebranding workshop

    Eight physicians across seven specialties, two hours. Individual positions to three agreed brand values (competence, breadth, empathy) and a shared decision that the practice needed renaming.

    Open the protected version →

About

Agreed, then built.

UX Architect with front-end roots: I know what it costs to build what I draw. From technical drafting at Zürich's planning office, through Interaction Design at ZHdK, to leading design systems at Cando.

Six years from ideation to implementation: as much process design, facilitation and coordination as tokens and components.

Systems as living infrastructure, not deliverables. When one stops serving the people who use it, I take it apart and rebuild it.

View full CV ↓

  1. 01/2024 – Present

    UX Architect

    Cando Image GmbH

    • Leads enterprise UX and design-system initiatives across B2B, e-commerce and operational risk-management platforms.
    • Keeps Figma libraries and Storybook implementations in sync with Angular- and React-based frontend teams.
    • Owns design-system governance and reusable component standards; cuts redundant design work through system thinking.
    • Facilitates internal UX and design-system workshops across teams.

  2. 09/2022 – Present

    Co-Founder & UX Strategy Consultant

    Formatfrei GmbH

    • UX and product-strategy consulting for clients including Zürich Tourismus and TSO AG.
    • Improved UX and engagement for platforms such as coachbetter.com and Goactive.ch; translated brand systems into Figma.
    • Co-facilitated the rebranding workshop for the Ärzte im Zentrum group practice in Weinfelden. Eight physicians across seven specialties, taken from individual positions to three agreed brand values and a decision to rename, in two hours.

  3. 06/2021 – 01/2024

    Interaction Designer & Front-End Developer

    Cando Image GmbH

    • Built responsive web interfaces with modern frameworks and a component-based architecture.
    • Grew and maintained a reusable component library for an e-commerce platform, shipping in agile teams.

  4. 08/2020 – 01/2021

    Civil Service, Teacher's Assistant

    Berufswahlschule Uster (BWSU)

    • Coached students one-to-one through writing applications and practising interviews, at a school for teenagers choosing a vocation.
    • Built HTML/CSS templates the students used to put their own applications online, a tool that let them do something they could not do unaided.
    • Ran IT support for the school and designed a new tool for handling detentions.

What I can prove

Every line here is evidenced somewhere else on this site. Follow it.

Information architecture
Owned the IA across every topic on Swissgrid 24/7, including the three-layer depth cap the whole product still runs on. Swissgrid 24/7 →
Design systems
A modular UI system built to absorb topics nobody had scoped yet, and the component set mokojam's team designs and builds against. mokojam →
Figma and code, kept in step
A design-to-code workflow the developers credit with a 3× faster start on a new feature, and that product managers and stakeholders can prototype in themselves, inside the real environment. Seismo Pulse →
Research that changes the design
Six nights wearing the medical device, mapped night by night. Most of what shipped came out of those nights. Journey to Recovery →
Getting experts to hand over the pen
By the second topic, Swissgrid's domain experts were applying the three-layer rule themselves rather than being sold it. Swissgrid 24/7 →
Facilitating a room of specialists
Eight physicians across seven specialties, two hours: scattered individual positions to three agreed values and a decision to rename the practice. The workshop →
Teaching, first-hand
Six months as a teacher's assistant at a Berufswahlschule: one-to-one coaching, interview practice, and HTML/CSS templates built so the students could put their own applications online. Full CV →
AI in the workflow, not on the poster
Pointed Figma's MCP server at the design file, found it half-worked at enormous cost, and threw it away for something duller that holds. The developers' own estimate of the difference: 3×. Seismo Pulse →

Concept & process

  • UX architecture
  • Information architecture
  • Interaction design
  • Design systems
  • 6 more in Concept & process
    • Ideation
    • Process design
    • User-centred design
    • Design thinking
    • Systems thinking
    • Component libraries

Facilitation & collaboration

  • Workshop facilitation
  • Stakeholder management
  • Project coordination
  • UX governance
  • 4 more in Facilitation & collaboration
    • Interdisciplinary collaboration
    • Agile ways of working
    • Sprint plannings
    • Backlog prioritisation

AI & innovation

  • Generative AI in concept and prototyping
  • AI-assisted workflows
  • Workflow automation
  • AI image generation
  • 1 more in AI & innovation
    • Research support

Design & media

  • Visual design
  • Motion design
  • Filming and video editing
  • Photoshop
  • 4 more in Design & media
    • Illustrator
    • InDesign
    • Premiere Pro
    • After Effects

Tools

  • Figma
  • Storybook
  • Frontify
  • Miro
  • 1 more in Tools
    • Jira

Front-end & development

  • Angular
  • React
  • Git
  • Developer handoff
  • 6 more in Front-end & development
    • HTML
    • CSS
    • JavaScript
    • Responsive web interfaces
    • Accessibility (WCAG)
    • Prototyping

Domain experience

  • Enterprise platforms
  • Critical infrastructure & risk management
  • B2B & B2C e-commerce
  • Digital platform strategy
  • 1 more in Domain experience
    • Product scaling

Education

  • BA Design, Interaction Design

    Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK)

    2017 – 2020

  • Professional Baccalaureate (Berufsmatura)

    Gestalterische Berufsmaturitätsschule Zürich

    2010 – 2014

Notable Awards

BOSW 2026: Master + Gold

Best of Swiss Web 2026: BOSW Master plus Gold in User Experience and Technology, as Co-Lead Designer on Swissgrid 24/7. A reminder that the boring work of getting systems right eventually shows.

2026BOSW AwardsCo-Lead Designer, Swissgrid 24/7, with Cando Image GmbHBOSW Master · Gold (User Experience) · Gold (Technology) · Silver (Innovation) · Bronze (Brand Experience)
2023BOSW AwardsLead Designer, mokojam, with Cando Image GmbHSilver (Innovation) · Bronze (Creativity) · Bronze (Productivity)
2023BOSW AwardsFE Developer & Designer, Cando CX (B2B e-commerce), with Cando Image GmbHGold (Technology)
2020AED Neuland AwardBachelor project, Journey-to-recovery.chGold (Interaction Design)
2020Swiss Design Association BA Award (SDA)Bachelor project, Journey-to-recovery.chBest BA graduation projects across all Swiss design schools

Design process

How I work

Five things I have come to work by. Not a sequence. Each one is a position, and each one cost something to learn.

  • Understand before simplifying

    I spend more time understanding the system than drawing it.

  • Reduce risk early

    The fastest prototype isn't the prettiest one. It's the one that answers the biggest question.

  • Design with developers

    Some of my best design decisions came from engineering conversations.

  • Users reveal the real problem

    Research isn't validation. It's usually where the project changes direction.

  • Systems over screens

    A good screen solves today. A good system keeps solving tomorrow.

You and I?

Three things that usually decide whether a collaboration works.

You like to ask Y?
Very often.
You won't get attached to first ideas.
Neither will I.
You'd rather learn from a prototype than debate a presentation.
I'll make them.
Randy Chen

Short email beats long brief.

Write to melinkedin.com/in/realrandychen

Phone number is in the protected CV.

Zürich, Switzerland · working with teams across CH, DE, and remote.

Write me