Current · San Francisco, CA
Master of Arts, Design
San Francisco State University
Researching mood, memory, and belonging in everyday products.
Hi, I'm
Laney Nguyen.
Product designer and SFSU graduate student researching mood, memory, and belonging through products people actually want to keep.
FIELD NOTES
Explore my journals
Four notebooks. Each one is a fun human-centered project.
2025 · Task completion rate increased from 87% to 98%
Melo: Mood and Music Journal
field notes · design case study
Melo
Redesigned Muse's Mood-Entry Flow to Raise Task Completion from 87% to 98% Through a Visible Free-Text Canvas
Solo designer
Research → IA → Visual System → Testing
Figma
+ survey & interview research
Capstone
Academic project
02 — the problem
Two Apps, No Bridge
Young adults (18–24) actively curate music to regulate how they feel, but the apps they use for mood and for music are separate.
emotional context
Daylio.
Low-friction clinical tracking, but collapses every feeling into five fixed words — no room for why, no link to the media shaping the mood.
Melo
The intersection of personalized mood recording and behavioral music tracking.
Spotify.
Enormous behavioral data on what users listen to, but zero model of why. Algorithms stay context-blind.
lowbehavioral logginghigh
Data privacy scored 5/5 in importance.
1 / 5
preparing field notes!
come back later to flip through
ABOUT ME
Look inside my stationery bag
My skills spilled! Help me reorganize my pouch.
drag each supply into its matching groove, then hover it ↖
Welcome to my sticker collection
Learn more about me as an individual
me, mid-café crawl
hover a sticker to read its note
RESUME
Flip through my notes
School, work, and the tools clipped to the back of my journal.
Academic
Richardson, TX
Bachelor of Arts, Art, Technology & Emerging Communications
University of Texas at Dallas
Focus in interaction design and emergent media.
Experience
Service design
Process Designer & Strategy Consultant
Institute of Mental Health · Extern
Mapped care-intake journeys and redesigned the handoff between clinicians and coordinators.
Data storytelling
Visual Data Storyteller & AI Designer
Canva · Extern
Turned dense usage data into narrative templates and explored AI-assisted layout patterns.
Product
Product Management Extern
BeReal · Extern
Ran competitive teardown and shaped a retention hypothesis around low-effort daily rituals.
Clipped notes
Tools
- Figma
- InDesign
- Illustrator
- Photoshop
- After Effects
- HTML / CSS
Certificates
- ✓ Google UX Design Specialization
- ✓ Oracle OCI AI Foundations Associate