HTC Sense
Building a Proprietary UX Platform at Global Scale Beyond 200+ Devices
Role
Director, UX Product Design Leadership (2007–2016)
Scope
Proprietary UX platforms (WM & Android) — TouchFLO · TouchFLO 3D · HTC Sense–v8.0
Reach
200+ smartphone models · 185 carrier partners · 80+ countries
Key Products
HTC Touch family · HTC Hero/Desire/Sensation flagships · HTC One series
CONTEXT
Designing a UX platform amid fragmentation
When HTC launched its first global-brand smartphone — the HTC Touch Diamond, built on TouchFLO 3D — in 2007, we established a UX foundation that aggregated context and layered a custom 3D UI over Windows Mobile. We designed a custom core experience and tuned the interfaces for finger-friendly interaction on resistive screens. That design philosophy paved the way to HTC Sense. When the HTC Dream launched in 2008 as the world's first Android phone, we pivoted to building a proprietary UX platform atop Android.
DESIGN LEADERSHIP
Building HTC's product experience
I joined HTC in 2007, as the company was transforming from an ODM/OEM supplier into a technology brand. I built the design practice up from TouchFLO, growing the team from visual design into a multidisciplinary organization. Over nine years of shipping products, I led the Taiwan-based design team as a pioneer architecting the UX platform — establishing the structured guidelines and workflows that made deep customization possible at scale.
KEY DESIGN DECISIONS
The evolution of HTC’s UX platform
The customization architecture
The depth of customization HTC offered carriers was genuinely unusual for its time — carrier requirements were built directly into the core UX, including many franchise-specific designs. I led the team to build a customizable design structure that balanced carrier demands against brand integrity, and to deliver tailored assets across regions.
Production design at scale
Delivering simultaneous carrier launches across 80+ countries with a team of 40+ required real design infrastructure. I led the global guideline architecture and formalized the customization specifications that governed handoff. To protect delivery quality, I established workflows and asset check-in systems that reduced branch conflicts across production lines.
An early design system
In those early years, designer-to-developer handoff was slow and lossy — usually just redline annotations on a handful of screens. I led the team to formalize handoff into a structured information system: documented modules for each Sense guideline, with reusable shared components and a global stylesheet to hold consistency across products.
OUTCOME
A pioneering, human-centric system
We established HTC Sense as an industry-first platform that deeply engineered the relationship between the system and the end user. We created the UX patterns and customization framework that held consistency across hundreds of devices — and the production workflows and delivery systems that supported 185 global partners, all built without precedent.