In today’s experience-driven product landscape, innovation is no longer about aesthetics or usability alone. It’s about rebuilding relationships, fostering understanding, and designing for trust. In a world driven by speed and systems, a quiet movement is unfolding: a return to empathy through design. Among the designers leading this shift is Yixuan (Sonia) Song, a UX designer at Google Cloud whose cross-disciplinary approach is redefining how technology can feel more human.
Her journey into design didn’t begin with pixels or prototypes, but in a psychiatric ward.
As a psychology undergraduate, Song spent two years interning in a hospital’s mental health department. Each day, she witnessed overworked doctors rushing between patients, often without the time to offer meaningful emotional support. What struck her even more were the people who never entered the room—those who, weighed down by stigma, chose silence over seeking help.
“It wasn’t about individual failure,” she recalls. “It was a systems problem. And I started to wonder if design could be part of the solution.”
Years later, that question took form in a product called MindMender. Independently initiated and designed by Song, MindMender is an AI-powered mental health companion. It blends AI journaling, biometric feedback, and gentle interaction design to support users emotionally through everyday challenges. There is no diagnosis, no confrontation—only a soft, ghost-like AI figure who offers presence without pressure.
MindMender has garnered significant international acclaim, winning the Best of Best award in UX Design at the 2024 Creative Communication Award (C2A) and top-tier honors at the NY Product Design Awards. Judges noted that the product wasn’t just functional but relational—a user experience designed around emotion, not just efficiency.
But that’s only half the story.
At Google Cloud, Song brings the same depth of thought to large-scale enterprise systems. She leads UX design for platforms like Dual Run and Migration Center, both central to Google Cloud’s modernization strategy. These tools serve enterprise customers navigating complex cloud migrations and mainframe modernization efforts—tasks that are technical, high-stakes, and often overwhelming.
Song’s work transforms these dense, jargon-heavy systems into guided, comprehensible experiences. Through layered information architecture, task-oriented interaction models, and visual clarity, she helps technical users understand what they’re doing and why—and, more importantly, trust the process.
This ability to design for both complexity and comfort is what distinguishes Song in the UX field. Her designs exist not just at the surface, but within the infrastructure of products that move industries.
Over the past year, her work has earned more than a dozen international design awards across user experience, systems innovation, and health technology—including recognition from the Creative Communication Award (C2A) and the NY Product Design Awards.
In parallel, she has been invited to serve as a judge for global design competitions such as the Creative Communication Award (C2A), Design MasterPrize (DMP), American Business Awards, and the Orpetron Web Design Awards. With her unique perspective spanning psychology, cloud systems, and narrative design, she now helps shape the standards by which tomorrow’s design excellence is measured.
Her work doesn’t shout. It doesn’t seek credit. But it quietly reshapes how people interact with technology—whether it’s a patient searching for peace or a cloud engineer navigating a migration path.
“If design can do anything,” she says, “maybe it’s just to say: someone thought of you here.”
To learn more about her work, visit www.soniasong.com or view her 2024 C2A Best of Best award-winning project, MindMender, https://www.c2award.com/winners/c2a/2024/5824/.
