Hello!

I'm Margaret Hoang ("hwong") - a product designer with a background in full-stack software development. As a strong advocate for usability (UX) and digital wellness, I strive after solutions that strengthen society and uplift the individual. I enjoy collaborating on teams united by mutual respect and the drive to do excellent work.

This site contains my old portfolio . . . I will be launching a new version soon!

LinkedIn // Substack // GitHub

Design

In June 2022, I switched fields to officially become a remote UX designer, a dream many years in the making.

My recent design work for Covenant Eyes (my current employer) includes:


Past Projects

A selection of usability-related projects I've completed while working, self-learning, or volunteering. Examples have been sanitized to remove any non-public information.



Education

My UX education has been a combination of self-directed learning, attending talks, seeking mentors at work, and presenting topics & book reviews to colleagues.

Courses & Community

Books

Skills

Tools

Audiobook Cover Design

Created with GIMP for LibriVox.org, a volunteer-run effort to provide free, public domain audiobooks in many languages. As required, each cover was created using public domain or Creative Commons 0 resources and open fonts, as well as completed within a 2-week timeframe.

With these covers, my goal is to provide a visualizer for the story, grab the listener's attention, and increase usability by making the title readable at thumbnail size. I also love to challenge myself by volunteering for a variety of book genres and experimenting with different artistic styles.

Sketch Samples



Final Versions

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the above LibriVox audiobooks do not necessarily reflect my own views, and my cover art does not represent any endorsement of the books or their authors. To the best of my knowledge, I try to create covers for books that look interesting or educational, but most of them I have not read personally.

Dev

Experience

Oct 2019–Jun 2022

Served as a full-stack developer for Covenant Eyes (Owosso, MI), a SaaS company empowering people to tackle their addiction to explicit content online. My work supported Covenant Eyes' Screen Accountability™ service in a variety of ways, including:

  • Developing internal services and customer-facing applications
  • Creating and presenting training material on my work in telemetry
  • Helping product designers assess feasibility of designs and ideate new options

In winter-spring 2021, I reworked large portions of the customer self-service portal (My Account) to implement a new brand look-and-feel. Closely guided by the UX team, my efforts included building out new UI component library elements, creating new layouts in Vue.js, and making extensive changes to the CSS stylesheets. The resulting high-fidelity implementation evokes the Covenant Eyes brand, improves usability for our members, and is more maintainable for developers. See examples here in the support documentation for My Account.

Nov 2018–Oct 2019

Led the software team for South Sound 911 (Tacoma, WA), providing applications and support for 41 police and fire agencies across Pierce County, WA. In addition to managing six developers, I advocated for UX processes on the tech team, assisted project managers (including taking on a PM role for smaller projects), and was Tier 3 support for mission-critical services.

Oct 2014–Oct 2018

Worked as a full-stack developer for South Sound 911 (Tacoma, WA). Collaboratively built software used by local law enforcement, firefighters, dispatchers, and records management personnel. Educated team members on design best practices and conducted usability tests.

Tech Stacks

Some languages and frameworks I have worked with extensively:

  • Microsoft stack: C#, ASP.NET, T-SQL
  • Java
  • Typescript / jQuery / JavaScript, Node, Express
  • Vue.js, Knockout.js
  • HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap, Skeleton
  • InfluxDB (time series database), Grafana
  • Powershell
  • PHP
  • F#, Selenium
  • XML, XSLT

I also have DevOps experience writing, maintaining, and extending deployment processes via MSBuild, NuGet packages, and Octopus Deploy.

Please see my LinkedIn for a more detailed resume and volunteer experiences.