Kiara Vong

WASHINGTON, DC Currently @

I’m passionate about interaction, UI/UX, and human-centered design. My driving force is understanding people, having empathy towards the challenges they are presented with, and helping them find solutions through intuitive design and insightful interaction. Off the clock, I hang out with my cats and lose, regularly, to a chess engine I wrote myself.

my cats, lyra & goose,
senior prompt engineers

Lyra and Goose, two cats, at one open laptop with Claude on the screen

Life imitates art?

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A photograph taken at Mitaka, Tokyo Printemps a Pont-Aven by Ernest de Chamaillard

Studio Ghibli Museum

INFO : Mitaka, Tokyo, Mar 2025

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Printemps à Pont-Aven

INFO : E. de Chamaillard, 1900

See the work

Stardew Valley companion

Look up any of the 34 villagers' favourite gifts, click around town to learn what each building does, then play one of four arcade cabinets built into the page. No framework, no build step, no game engine.

Dorms @ Brown

A housing-decision app for the lottery: every dorm on campus with photos, floor plans and peer reviews, plus a quiz that narrows thirty dorms to a shortlist. React, Java and Firebase.

UI/UX case studies

An earlier portfolio built around research and process rather than final screenshots: each piece walks through the problem, what was tried, and what actually shipped.

A procedural 3D island built tile by tile with wave function collapse, the same technique games like Bad North use to grow coherent worlds from a small set of hand-modelled pieces.

Pac-Man rebuilt in the browser, four ghosts included. They share one movement system and differ only in the tile each one aims at, which is a cheap way to buy four personalities.

A playable board with an opponent behind it: move generation, alpha-beta search, and an evaluation that is honest about how much it does not know.