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San Ramon, CA – September 22, 2026 – In September, the sun fell on the sand outside the Sunshine Brooks Theater in Oceanside, California. Valio Con 2026 had just wrapped — a three-day Creative Tech Conference that brought together over a hundred designers, founders, and engineers. Rising product designer Hu Xiaoxiao returned from the venue looking a little tired, but she still spoke quickly, charged with the kind of energy that comes from being fully recharged.

She uses the word “exciting” to describe those three days. So many experienced designers gathered in one place, exchanging ideas, colliding in thought — it was inspiring. Listening to talks, seeing what others were building, she learned a great deal. It was also a recharge.

The atmosphere at Valio Con surprised her. There was no baggage between people meeting for the first time; everyone was willing to talk and connect. She says the conference was both learning and socializing — but it was also more than that. There was a kind of self-confirmation. She felt her vision for her own career path in design had become a little clearer.

During the on-site Demo session, attendees could show the group what they were working on. She shared her most recent project: Women in Science Fiction: The Untold Stories, a UX web design project.

“This project comes entirely out of my personal interest,” she says. “I wanted to learn about science fiction writers from different regions and different language systems — writers who haven’t been translated into English, who haven’t been discovered by a wider audience. And many of them are women. I think that matters.”

She is researching them one writer at a time, reading their work as she goes. Quite a few people at the conference also read science fiction, and they were visibly delighted by the project. “It seems like nobody in the industry is doing this. I’m the first,” she says. “But luckily, the topic really resonated.”

Hu Xiaoxiao studied HCI & Mathematics at Wellesley, cross-registered at MIT, and later did design and research at the MIT Media Lab. Her math courses at the liberal arts college leaned conceptual, focused on the craft of writing proofs. By the later stage, she was studying topology — grappling with abstract problems that were almost impossible to visualize, unlike anything she had encountered before. Every day was math; every assignment was proofs and theory. She used to find that part dry. But the ability to dissect problems that she developed during that time became the core skill she now relies on as a rising product designer.

That training shaped the way she designs. She reads science fiction, she cares about the essence of a problem and abstract concepts, and she leans toward breaking problems down rather than jumping straight to output.

When I suggest that many designers emphasize creative inspiration and free-form expression, and don’t bring much rationality into the process, she pushes back immediately. In her view, at least for product design, you still have to start from the product as the core. You need to understand what problem the product faces, what problem its users face, and then how to solve it — addressing both the business problem and the user problem at once. Visuals are just the final form, the shape the answer takes. The process between the original problem and the visual or UI solution — that is the designer’s real work. Others may only see the final UI, like the tip of an iceberg. But beneath the water, there is so much more.

She considers herself a designer in the conventional sense — she holds her visual work to a high standard, and others describe her UI as clean. But she believes the hardest part of design isn’t visual at all. It’s the problem-solving thinking at the very beginning of the process.

As she understands it, a designer should be able to communicate with different stakeholders, to speak their language. But she admits she isn’t great at talking to product managers — she prefers working with engineers, and she’s less diplomatic as a result. I ask whether that means she cares more about the design process itself, or the product process itself, than about the commercial direction. Her answer is immediate: yes.

On AI, she defines herself upfront: fairly neutral. She supports using AI to improve efficiency, but she’s against one particular phenomenon — product managers who don’t understand design using AI to generate a prototype, and the result is poor quality.

Her most common approach is to use Claude Code to turn design mockups into interactive prototypes — the kind users can actually try and test. AI is an accelerator here. Once you turn a design into something click-through, everything speeds up. But the precondition is that the design direction must be hers. She needs to be sure that every design is something she has genuinely tested and made decisions about before turning it into an AI prototype — not handing it off to AI when she herself doesn’t yet have a clear direction. In her view, AI’s quality hasn’t reached that level yet. A truly good designer won’t hand decisions straight to AI. Even when brainstorming with AI, they’ll verify it again, adjust based on the product and the user — not let AI make a hundred percent of the decisions.

She now spends roughly fifty to sixty percent of her working time using AI, mostly Claude Code. The change isn’t just personal efficiency — it’s also the collaboration workflow. Before, front-end engineers had to go into the design file and inspect each component’s form and code one by one. Now, she generates prototypes with Claude Code, and front-end engineers can read the code directly and know how each component behaves. The handoff cost drops significantly. In her hands, AI isn’t just a personal tool — it’s a translator between designers and engineers.

Her biggest recent project is a voice agent. When she first joined the team, engineers were dominant — the database structure and code architecture had already been defined, with no input from the product or design side. That was a major constraint. The first version of the design followed the backend structure entirely, built around what they could implement.

But after the first version was done, she interviewed some users. She knew immediately that this was far from the optimal solution. She went straight to the CTO and proposed finding a better approach through user interviews. The CTO agreed. She spent over a month conducting user interviews, wrote up the report, and convinced the CTO. The second version of the design started entirely from a design-centered perspective.

That was a significant achievement — a designer using real data and user feedback to overturn decisions the engineers had made. She’s careful to emphasize that she wasn’t fighting the CTO; she was proposing. That word choice matters. She wasn’t arguing from emotion or position — she was persuading with user interview data and a report. It also explains why she says she prefers working with engineers: she cares about how the problem gets solved, not about who’s in charge.

At Valio Con, she observed many teams building AI design tools: users feed in instructions, AI generates the design directly, then converts it straight into production code for engineers to deploy. It sounds like an attempt to replace the designer’s role. But she thinks that’s where the biggest controversy lies — and that the intent behind these tools isn’t replacement, but getting designers involved in the actual code deployment step. Before, designers were stuck inside their own design files and had no say in how code got deployed. Now these tools want to bring the designer’s canvas into the deployment process.

She agrees with a point made at the conference: designers are the most complete problem-solvers. To become a truly excellent designer, you need to understand that you have to make decisions at every step of solving a problem. But she also sees the other side: junior designers will have a harder time. Early on, they may not be assigned important work and end up handling only UI improvements — and if all you do is UI, you lose the designer’s core ability.

I ask what she hopes people will remember her for — a particular product, a particular design method, or her as a person. She says that as a person, she’s fairly memorable. After talking with many senior designers, they all felt it was easy to become friends with her, easy to connect. She attributes it to personality, not title. She says she doesn’t really know — it’s abstract, just personality, she guesses.

In her view, that personality may be more visible in the design industry — she has a lot of ideas, she’s a bit jumpy, her thinking moves fast. She easily finds points of inspiration with different people. She roughly knows what they’re talking about, and can find common ground across different topics. This connective thinking actually mirrors her design logic: start from the user’s problem, and look for solutions across different fields. She isn’t someone who only knows design — she’s someone who can connect different things. At that point in our conversation, I can’t help saying that design really does seem to suit her.

One last question: what does she most want to do that she hasn’t started yet. The answer is 3D. She hasn’t systematically done 3D, hasn’t touched industrial products or industrial design, and has rarely done 3D rendering on a computer. So it feels interesting to her.

Her interest in 3D isn’t about visuals — it’s about spatial perception and physical interaction. What is an object like when it exists in real physical space, and how should it interact with people and with physical states? That is, once you strip away the online or virtual-reality medium, how does a 3D object interact with us in real life? That’s the part she finds interesting. She describes it as a kind of return — perhaps a return to real life. There’s a saying now: everyone should go touch the grass.

That line carries a particular kind of persuasiveness when applied to her. She works on Voice AI, generates prototypes with Claude Code, and talks about AI design tools at Valio Con — all things online, virtual, AI-related. But the next thing she most wants to do is return to physical space and touch the grass.

As she puts it, UI is only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lies a designer’s dissection of problems, her user interviews, her overturning of engineering decisions, her longing for physical space. Those invisible parts are what she truly cares about.（By Emily Carter）

About Us

Product Designer at Five9. Wellesley BA in HCI & Mathematics, MIT cross-registration. Skilled in end-to-end product design, agentic AI prototyping, UX research & design systems. Building user-centric AI products from 0-to-1 for enterprise customers.

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City: San Ramon
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