Chao Su
Founder and CEO
Chao has over 10 year experience in industrial design, UX design, research and strategic roles. His expertise includes creating insight-led digital strategies and utilizing design thinking methodologies to understand consumer needs. With five year work experience in both US and Europe, Chao works well with both international and Chinese clients.
At OneLeap, Chao has worked with clients in industries including insurance, education, consumer products and consumer electronics including JD.com, Pearson, Philips, Bosch and Education First.
Chao holds a MA of Design from Institute of Design, Chicago, and a BA of Engineering from Tongji University in China.
Gladys Lu
Co-founder and Head of Research
Gladys helps organizations become customer-centered and develop their internal capability for repeatedly creating, launching, and scaling new offerings and compelling customer experiences. She has dedicated her career to innovation—doing it, leading it, and teaching it. Her specialty lies in helping early stage start-up ventures to demystify complexity through research and insights generation. She often helps catalyze start-ups’ success through her human-centered strategies development and unique way of storytelling.
Gladys is an expert in psychology, sociology and anthropology. She has been practicing research in various industries including education, automobiles, robotic technologies, and consumer electronics. Her selected clients include General Motors, iRobot, LG, Visa, Xiaomi, etc.
Gladys holds a BA in Economics and a BS in Psychology from University of California, Berkeley. Her past projects have won IF Design Award, Reddot Design Award, IDEA Design Award and G-Mark Design Awards.
Emily Cai
Co-founder
Emily has 6 years in Market Research & User Research. She can design research both qualitatively and quantitatively based on requests covering product design and service design. She is familiar with user research at the phase of the concept ideation, iteration, prototyping, testing and validation. Emily has conducted extensive user tests and home immersions in Great China regions and Asia Pacific.
Emily has extensive experiences working as an ethnographer, design researcher, videographer for consumer research, user research, UX research, service design and product innovation. Her clients include Universal studios, Samsung, Siemens, Coca-Cola, L'oreal and etc. She has worked with design agencies such as Frog, IDEO, DesignIt, Seymourpowell and PDD.
Emily holds degrees in both design anthropology (University of London) and Bachelor of Commerce, specialized in Marketing.
Hongxuan Ge
UX Design and Researcher
Hongxuan is a UX designer and researcher who is passionate about facilitating user-centered research to solve complex problems, extract underlying user needs and pain points, compile them into insights and concepts, and deliver innovative results to improve both digital and physical experience for users and customers.
Hongxuan has worked in industries including healthcare, education and consumer electronics. He has served clients including Illinois Department of Human Service, Respiratory Health Association, Education First and Pearson.
Hongxuan holds a Master degree of Design from Institute of Design, IIT, Chicago, and a Bachelor degree of Engineering from Xidian University.
Zheng Chen
Business Analyst
Zheng Chen is an expert in business analysis and operations. She fully understands business process optimization and is always able to find new ways to solve problems faced by clients in different industries.
Prior to OneLeap, Zheng worked as a business operation consultant in Harting China and Germany, and Nokia Germany where she gained extensive experience in data-driven business operations. At OneLeap, Zheng provides analysis report and shares insights about the China business market.
Zheng holds a Master’s degree in Computational Engineering Science from Technical University of Berlin. She is fluent in Chinese, English and German.