Orion's Portfolio

A developer-turned designer.

Software Engineer
UX Designer
Photographer
Orion's profile picture

Hey! Get to know my career path in one short paragraph.

My name is Xiaolei Qin (秦啸雷 if you read Chinese), but you may call me Orion. I am currently a HCI/UX master student at UT Austin. I was previously a software engineer who was really into design, and now I am learning about it! I enjoy learning new technologies and designing things, and I care about user experience deeply. I am eager to provide my unique perspectives and to become a bridge between engineers and designers!

Experience

All about my past.

From developing design systems to making VR experience.


Here is the PDF version: View PDF

Design Engineer

@ Visa Inc.

Most Recent

May 2022 - June 2024

  • Spearheaded the creation and management as the lead engineer for Visa Design System React library–Nova, enhancing collaboration between designers and engineers to deliver seamless user experiences.
  • Achieved industry-level accessibility (WCAG 2.1) compliance for Nova, significantly improving accessibility and inclusivity, in collaboration with A11y researchers.
  • Authored comprehensive documentation of Nova in React and led knowledge-sharing sessions, resulting in a 50% time reduction in onboarding time for new developers.
  • Identified and implemented process improvements for VaultKey+ Design system in both React and Angular.
  • Facilitated cross-functional communication and problem-solving, leading to a 30% decrease in bug resolution time in VaultKey+.
  • Provided critical support for North American and Asia-Pacific regions, successfully addressing and resolving high-priority issues in both legacy and new design systems.

Visualization (Frontend Engineer) Intern

@ MANN HUMMEL USA Inc.

Aug 2021 - May 2022

  • Led the design of a specialized portal interface collaborating with the leadership team. Developed a single-page application (SPA) using React + Typescript and MS Graph API, allowing leadership teams to visualize and edit datasets seamlessly, reducing dependency on SharePoint lists and online Excel. Achieved a 50% improvement in team efficiency by implementing the new web portal.
  • Reimagined a legacy Production Console Interface, creating a user-friendly tablet interface for internal clients using Figma, enhanced the overall user experience, contributing to improved usability and efficiency by 40% in day-to-day operations.

Trusty

How do we design a news app that is trustworthy and unbiased? How can we reduce users' mental load while seeing news from all over the world? We created a user-friendly app experience that focused on transparency in news sourcing, making it easy for users to verify the credibility of information directly within the app interface.

Though this is our first Creative Jam, we receive an honorable mention, placing in the top 20 out of 315 teams in the competition!

UI design
Prototyping

Game Engine

C++

My first game engine designed and developed by myself from the scratch throughout the whole semester. This game engine is based on SFML as the graphic interface, and 0MQ to support the server-client connection. The Game engine includes all the basic funtionalities including Component based GameObjects, Multiplayer ablities, mutli-threaded processing, EventSytsem, Double Timeline supports and Duktape/Dukglue Scripting abilities. I have used this Game Engine to developed two games, one is a 2D platformer and the second one is the Space Invader.

Game engine project's thumbnail

Circulation Immersion

Unity

Circulation is an interactive virtual environment that allows an individual to accentuates our emotional connections with nature and visualize the reactions to our presence. I developed this project in a team with students from the Art and Design department at NC State University. We learn and used Unity and C# to script our interactive environment and used Maya to model and animate the animals in the environment. We also earned the honor to make to the annual game showcase at NC State University.

Demo: Youtube link
Source code: Github link

Circulation project's thumbnail

iTrust Medical Web Portal

Web

This is a medical portal for the hospital and users are allowed to login with their credentials. We integrated 4 more use cases to the protal that read in a list of individuals' data and calculate the infection rate. I was focusing on the testing and debugging, and we learned to implement and to utilize testing automation with Selenium and Cucumber. To acheive the functionality of the web app, and I was learning what each part of code was responsible and try to fix all the bugs. Meanwhile, since it is a team project, I also need to manage and coordinate with other tema members virtually to accomplish the result.

iTrust project's thumbnail

Paint War Demo Game

Unity

Paint War is a game that allows two players to catch and bounce paintballs to each other, and if the ball splashed on the edge of the screen with enough amount, the other side wins. This is a team project with Master students from the Art and Design Department, and this is my first game developed using Unity Engine. We learned and used particle system built inside the engine and developed the mechanics using scripts.

Source code: Github link

Paint War project's thumbnail

Outlaw Machinima

Unity

This is a machinima Project using Unity Engine. I worked this project with another student in the Art and Design Design department. Based on the true story of the infamous Zodiac Killer, we developed a imaginary scene that as a reporter(first-person-view), you accidentally ran into a suspicious house that might related to the zodiac killer. As you explored the house, you starts to discover the strangeness of the house.

See this very fun short film: Google drive link

Outlaw Machinima project's thumbnail

University of Texas at Austin

Current

M.S. Information Studies Human-Computer Interaction & UX Design Aug 2024 - May 2026 (expected)

North Carolina State University


B.S. Computer Science Minor in Art & Design Aug 2017 - May 2021

Education

The bedrock of my curiosity.

Once belongs to a Wolfpack, now becoming one of the Longhorns.