Hi, I'm Qian — a product designer who's spent 8+ years untangling messy problems, mostly in healthcare. I ask "why" a lot.

I worked with Qian for about three years—first on the Self Check-in team, and later on Patient Conversations at athenahealth. She's one of the best designers I've worked with, and I recommend her highly.

Qian is skilled at understanding client needs, and then producing high-quality, thoughtful design work remarkably fast. I could hand her a problem and trust she would come back with thorough research and one or more well-considered designs. Just as important, I could also trust her to push back and challenge my assumptions where appropriate, which consistently led to better results.

Her work shaping the Patient Conversations inbox—where staff find and respond to patient messages sent via SMS—is particularly noteworthy. athenahealth serves an enormously wide range of clients, and designing something that works for all of them is genuinely hard. After mapping the problem space, Qian produced a set of designs that held up across our full spectrum of clients, balancing the needs of small specialty practices and large multi-site organizations in one coherent experience. Not an easy feat.

Beyond her skills, Qian is simply a wonderful person to work with—smart, friendly, easy to collaborate with, and reliably positive even under pressure. She made the team better, and I'll miss working with her.

I worked with Qian for about four years at athenahealth, and would do it again in a heartbeat. Throughout that time, she delivered solid work, consistently, through all manner of ambiguity and massive industry transformation.

In our work together, Qian built strong client and user empathy through ongoing partnerships, meeting regularly with both to gather feedback, test her thinking, and adjust accordingly. Just as importantly, she brought those learnings back to the team, helping ensure that the people we were designing for remained present in our conversations and decisions.

Qian is thoughtful, curious, and deeply collaborative. She has a way of engaging difficult or ambiguous problems without losing sight of the human beings at the center of them. She listens well, asks good questions, and is willing to evolve her thinking as she learns—qualities that made both her work and the teams around her stronger. Do your team a favor and work with her if you get the chance!

I had the opportunity to mentor Qian at athenahealth, and watching her growth and accomplishments over that time was impressive.

She is a genuinely talented product designer. What set her apart was that she never sat still with it. She was always pushing to sharpen her craft and widen her scale of impact.

You could see it in the work. She moved from self check-in to owning design for patient conversations, a greenfield problem space, as the sole designer on what became a fast-growing product. That is a lot of surface area for one person. She held her own.

She understands the tradeoffs that get made between design, engineering, and product, especially under tight timelines. She navigates them without losing the thread of what the work is actually for.

And she brings real integrity and care to it.

I recommend her strongly. If you want someone well-rounded and thoughtful, she is it.