By: Felicia Guo
When Mingjie Chen set out to book a moving service for a routine apartment move, he assumed it would take a few minutes. Instead, the search spiraled into an hours-long maze of tabs, quotes, and dead-end phone calls. “I kept calling different companies and somehow ended up with nothing,” he says. The absurdity of the experience, when technology meant to save us time ends up wasting it, forced him to pause. That experience crystallized everything he’d learned as a UX designer into one question: Why are we letting tools make us work harder? His guiding principle has been to create straightforward, self-contained products and experiences both in his day job and his entrepreneurial endeavors.
Reinventing Onboarding for Enterprises
Photo Courtesy: Mingjie Chen
At one of his previous companies, the employee onboarding process was very involved. “It was a disjoint process full of paperwork,” Chen says. And the complexity was on both the new hires’ and the HR admins’ ends. In the original system, the HR team dealt with different electronic and paper materials for each role, and the new hires were disengaging before they even started working. This was leading to high turnover, where one in five new hires would quit in the first 45 days. And on the other end, HR were spending 35% of their time on manual administrative onboarding tasks.
Chen led the redesign of the platform’s end-to-end onboarding experience. He architected an onboarding framework that fundamentally shifted how enterprise data is handled. By integrating easy-to-use front-end UI and back-end employee data, he solved a critical bottleneck that had plagued the HR industry for years. The result: enterprise teams described the experience as “simple,” “clear,” and “night-and-day compared to before”, exactly what Mingjie set out to achieve. The design was adopted at scale. The revamped system now supports over 200,000 daily active users across multiple Fortune 500 companies and has become a deciding factor in winning new enterprise customers.
Using AI to Save People’s Time
Photo Courtesy: Mingjie Chen
Besides his main job, Chen uses his UX expertise in developing AI-native products in several other domains. His focus is still to make technology subservient to humans, helping them achieve their tasks with little friction and no frustration. His latest project, HiveMatch, which Chen designed collaboratively with his team, streamlines connecting customers to gig workers, and ensures that neither he nor other users will feel the frustration he felt that weekend day he wasted searching for a house mover.
The design focuses on efficiency and ease of use. The application can accept text, voice, or both prompts. The user selects the time, place, and budget, then the AI agent gets to work. It handles the search, comparison, and analysis of available offerings based on customer inputs, then provides a curated list of options that best match their needs. The design maintains human agency at the critical moment: users still make the final choice, but after the AI has narrowed the overwhelming number of options down to a few meaningful ones.
The design won more than six design awards across four continents and from international associations, including the Red Dot Design Award. “We did not only save users’ time and reduced it from days to minutes, but also ensured they get the most value out of each deal,” says Chen.
Designing Technology That Serves People, Not the Other Way Around
Whether improving enterprise onboarding workflows or shaping the future of AI-assisted consumer tools, Chen’s goal remains constant: to design systems that free people from unnecessary complexity. “At the end of the day, users don’t care about the mechanics behind a system; they just want to get their task done and move on,” he says.
Chen continues to apply his design philosophy across AI-powered products, guided by the weekend he wasted hunting for a house mover. “Every time I design something,” he says, “I ask whether it’s giving people time back, or taking it away.”
