Senior Experience, Product & Design Leader

I love UX most when it leaves the screen and becomes part of real life.

Charlene Yong

I am passionate about tangible customer experiences, especially when digital decisions affect a store visit, a product choice, a team workflow, or a customer’s confidence. I also love using AI tools to remove inefficiency, clarify messy requests, and help people make better decisions faster.

Reports toVP of Caldecott Music Group and GM of Vista Musical Instruments.
Cross FunctionalInfluencing and learning across marketing, retail, VIP service, product, and strategy.
EcosystemSeven brands under one shared ecommerce ecosystem experience.
DedicationNew feature reporting, in-store kiosk insights, and employee feedback consolidation.

Proudest Work

Experience design with shipped constraints.

Vista Musical Instruments

Swee Lee + VMI Ecosystem

Swee Lee is the name customers know. Vista Musical Instruments is the system behind it: brands, stores, ecommerce, templates, operations, and design decisions that need to hold together across markets.

Design Lead Ecommerce Design Ops Design Systems

Founder build

One By One

Self-built gown rental platform shaped around local booking pain, fit anxiety, and trust.

FlutterFlowApp StoreBrand

Platform design

UNIFY White Label

KPMG Digital Village rewards platform reskinned for BMW, KRIS+, STB, and SCB.

KPMG DVWhite LabelRewards

Enterprise UX

Standard Chartered Bank

CRM and workshop work shaped around Dynamics, iframe limits, and regional teams.

CRMResearchWorkshop

Vista Musical Instruments

Retail UX across seven brands.

I work across Swee Lee and the wider VMI portfolio, connecting ecommerce, retail, content, design systems, and store feedback. My job is to turn demand into clearer decisions: what to build, what to reuse, what to reject, and what needs more evidence before the team moves.

RoleUX/UI Design Lead
Team3 direct reports across Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand
Influence7+ teammates across marketing, design, retail ops
FocusDesign governance, ecommerce UX, retail feedback, decision quality

Problem Architecture

Messy product, people, and operations problems that needed judgment before pixels.

A / Brief Chaos

Long briefs are not clear briefs.

I built a Slack brief template and AI intake check so unclear requests get fixed before they enter the sprint.

B / Build Discipline

Every build has to earn maintenance.

I pushed for reusable patterns across brands, templates, text styles, colour sheets, and future change.

C / Store Reality

Digital decisions meet real counters.

I used kiosk reports, store visits, staff feedback, and shopper conversations to catch what dashboards missed.

D / Personalisation

Personalisation without extra spend.

I worked with dev to use existing shopping-history behavior, including “customers who bought this also bought.”

E / Conflict Bridge

Conflict becomes a design problem.

I hear people separately, map the friction, make the decision visible, then bring teams back to shared criteria.

F / Reporting Loop

Launch is not the finish line.

I compare feature performance week to week and turn findings into actions for product, content, and engineering.

My Leadership Framework

How I Lead Decisions.

01 / Intake gate

No clarity, no commitment.

I use structured briefs and an AI-assisted missing-info check before work enters production. The goal is clarity: a business reason, an owner, a timeline, and a decision path.

  • Ask: What problem is this solving?
  • Ask: What information is missing before design should start?

02 / Build filter

A component must earn its future maintenance.

New Shopify components are not approved for single-use requests. I check whether the pattern can survive brands, templates, content rules, and future UX needs before engineering builds.

  • Ask: Can this reuse an existing pattern?
  • Ask: What breaks if we scale this across every brand?

03 / Conflict bridge

Treat disagreement like a design problem.

When teams disagree, I speak to people individually, identify the real friction, make the problem visible, then bring the group back together to decide against shared criteria.

  • Ask: What is each team actually protecting?
  • Ask: What decision can move us forward today?

About

Designer. Lead. Product Partner.

I care about design that becomes part of real routines: buying, collecting, visiting, comparing, repairing, gifting, learning, and coming back. Singapore shaped that lens for me: the best experiences here often sit between service, convenience, and operational detail.

I turn loose creative demand into product decisions, systems, and shipped experiences.

Find out more

How I work

Ask better questions Protect team focus Bridge teams Make constraints visible Use data carefully Visit the floor Prototype quickly Design for reuse Mentor patiently Push back kindly