About Irwin Hou

About Me

I design digital products that make complex problems feel simple. For over a decade, I've turned ambiguity into intuitive experiences through systems thinking, interaction design, and hands-on prototyping.

It started with curiosity. I taught myself HTML & CSS by inspecting source code and building my own sites. Learning by building still shapes how I design. That same instinct now points at AI: I use it daily to prototype, pressure-test ideas, and move faster from concept to something real.

At Verizon, I shape customer-facing experiences at enterprise scale, designing for millions of users while balancing business priorities, accessibility, and technical feasibility. It's also where AI became part of how I work day to day, actively encouraged across the org.

Before that, as Design Lead and UX Manager at PwC Products & Technology, I led design across multiple enterprise SaaS products, helped scale a shared design system, and mentored designers.

Earlier, I spent nearly a decade at Forbes, growing from UI/UX Designer to the company's sole UX Designer. I designed editorial experiences, interactive features, and the proprietary CMS still used by newsroom staff and thousands of contributors.

Prototyping is central to how I work. From early concepts to production-like builds, I use prototypes to explore ideas, align stakeholders, and validate decisions before development. That front-end fluency helps me design with implementation in mind. Lately it also means vibe coding, turning ideas into working concepts in hours instead of days. Take this site: originally hand-coded in Astro.js, with the most recent refinements and performance work built in VS Code with Claude.

I'm at my best when the path forward isn't obvious: defining a new product, modernizing a legacy experience, scaling a design system. Bringing clarity to complexity is the work I enjoy most.