An androgynous asian person wearing an unbuttoned blue shirt with white t-shirt underneath. She has short black hair with her head tilted with a slight smile. An androgynous asian person wearing an unbuttoned blue shirt with white t-shirt underneath. She has short black hair with her head tilted with a slight smile.

Hello!
I'm Katie Chen.

I’m a designer with a knack for bringing diverse people together to turn ideas into reality. For the past 10 years, I’ve worked with startups, co-founded a company, built and lead teams and created experiences used by millions of people.
Currently, I'm a Staff Product Designer at Slack.

Recent works

An android mobile in the foreground. In the background are hand-drawn illustrations of a calendar and Airbnb’s search criteria. In the mobile screen is Airbnb’s search experience showing a map and some price pins. There are two Airbnb plus listings, an image of a living room with brick walls and another image of an Airstream.

Illustration by my dear friend, Adam Glynn-Finnegan

Airbnb

2014 ~ 2018

Design Lead for teams enabling travel and people to belong anywhere.

  • Lead Guest Experience for Airbnb Plus, a new class of homes verified for quality and design.
  • Lead design for Airbnb for Work and made managing and booking business trips on behalf of someone a breeze.
  • Designed new guest experience on mobile, creating the foundational interactions and components in Airbnb’s Design Language System (DLS).
  • Lead design for Search. Created contextual search experiences for guests to better book a home and discover where to go for a weekend getaway.

Illustration by my dear friend, Adam Glynn-Finnegan

A website design in greyscale in the background with colour dots in the foreground. One of the dots has an expanded comment box. In the comment box there are design feedback and a comment mid-composition with a ‘post this comment’ button in green below it.

Red Pen

2013 ~ Present

Co-founded and built a design feedback service enabling teams to collaborate effortlessly.

  • Product and marketing design, front-end eng and product management.
  • Customers included prominent design teams in Silicon Valley, multi-national agencies, small businesses, schools and startups around the world.
  • Learnt valuable lessons in running a profitable business, user research processes, content writing, design and iteration with customers.
A person is using a laptop that is sitting on a desk. The Zibbet website is on display. It is showing the storefront page of a seller. The person appears to be scrolling through the website.

Zibbet

Freelance

Lead the re-design of a marketplace powered by an indie community of artists and makers.

I worked closely with the founder and re-design the experience from the ground up. This included design guidelines, marketing, search experience, shopfronts, product page, inventory management and analytics. At the time, this impacted over 10,000 stores.

What drives me

I strive to level the playing field for people to access opportunities and services through design and technology. Design should not be exclusive. I am a mentor for women and people of color in tech.

Other Pursuits
Hexagon UX

Design mentor

Lesbians Who Tech

Advisory Board Member