Edna Ho is a design student at UC Berkeley whose portfolio reaches beyond digital interfaces into engineering and physical product design.

That range gives the work another dimension. She can work within an expressive consumer brand, explain specialized software, and design experiences that involve something you hold or use away from a screen.

Her portfolio keeps digital product design at the center while making room for those overlaps. Let’s look at what makes that combination work, and where she could give visitors more opportunities to explore it.

Edna understands how headings and visuals need to work together.

Her case studies use prominent headings to carry the story, with imagery sharing the attention. Visitors can read the main point and see the work that supports it without having to search through a paragraph for the connection.

Her Duolingo Conversation Quest makes that especially clear.

Concept projects for established products are difficult to execute well. A designer has to understand the product closely enough to propose something plausible, then match a visual language that has already been developed and refined by an experienced team.

A feature can sound sensible and still feel disconnected once you see the screens.

Edna’s work feels unusually convincing on both fronts.

Her concept introduces a social way to practice language with friends. From the outside, I can understand how that could belong within Duolingo’s existing experience. It relates to what people use the product for and gives its social elements a purpose within the learning experience.

The presentation follows through on that idea.

Edna adopts the product’s visual language closely, from the components and illustrations to the way the interactions are shown. The case study feels consistent with the brand throughout.

If someone had told me this was work completed during an internship, the visual execution would not have made me question it. That is how comfortably the concept sits within the product.

She also gives individual parts of the experience room to be understood.

Large moving visuals introduce the work. Further down, she isolates features and shows interactions in context, allowing the viewer to follow what someone would do and how the product responds.

That is more useful than presenting a collection of polished screens and leaving the reader to reconstruct the experience.

The opening visual could make the underlying problem more apparent. I can recognize the language-learning context and the involvement of another person before I fully understand the need being addressed.

But as the story develops, the relationship between the idea and the product becomes clear.

I read this project as evidence of craft and product judgment. It shows that Edna can study an existing ecosystem, work within its visual rules, and propose an experience that feels like it belongs there.

A concept cannot tell us everything about how a feature would perform after launch. Duolingo may have explored similar ideas and encountered constraints we cannot see from outside the company.

That does not take away from what Edna demonstrates here.

For a role involving a consumer product with a strong visual identity, this case study would make me want to speak with her. I would still have questions about her decisions and the rest of her experience, but the work gives me a strong reason to start that conversation.

Edna shows five full case studies, which is around the upper limit I usually recommend.

With large project cards, visitors need to move through the work one piece at a time before they can appreciate the range. Every project needs to earn that space.

In Edna’s case, the range helps explain what she can bring to a team.

Alongside the consumer work, her Pseudorandom project involves a Rhino plugin for architects. It places her inside specialized software, where understanding the underlying workflows matters as much as making the interface approachable.

She makes the technical subject understandable to someone like me, who has little experience in that field.

That combination is valuable. Edna can engage with the mechanics of a system and still consider how someone should experience it. Her technical background remains visible in the design work.

Her Muse project takes that range further by connecting a physical interface with an AI-powered audio experience.

This introduces a different set of constraints. Someone is interacting with an object, using their hands, and experiencing the result in a physical environment. The interface has to make sense within that setting.

Edna and her teammates bring those pieces together in a way that feels considered. The physical form and digital behavior belong to the same experience, and the presentation helps me understand that relationship.

I would find this impressive even when hiring for a role focused on software.

It shows her working through constraints beyond the ones digital product designers encounter every day. That could be useful in complex software, where understanding how several parts of a system connect is often a large part of the job.

What makes the portfolio work is the focus she maintains while showing that range.

A project combining physical and digital design could become difficult to follow if the case study explained every engineering decision, fabrication step, and interface choice at equal length.

Edna keeps the product experience in view. She brings in enough technical and physical context to explain the work, while giving the digital decisions the attention they need.

I cannot know how deliberately she made every editorial choice, but the result feels focused.

Designers with experience in engineering, industrial design, or another adjacent field can learn from this. Those overlaps can help explain why you approach a problem differently and what you are capable of making.

Edna gives them space without making the visitor work out which kind of designer they are looking at.

Edna’s portfolio puts the work first, and I am comfortable with that choice.

The site acts as a clear container for the projects. It does not need to become a large interactive production to make the work compelling.

I did, however, reach the bottom of the homepage and wonder whether I had seen everything.

There were links to her resume, LinkedIn, and email, but I wanted to learn more about her and see what she explored beyond the main case studies.

Those destinations were available in the navigation at the top. Once I started scrolling, I lost sight of them.

I went back because I was actively looking. Another visitor might finish the project list and leave without realizing there was more worth seeing.

This could be a small change.

Repeating the About and Playground links near the bottom would give someone a natural next step after reviewing the work. Edna could also introduce each destination with a compact preview: a few lines about herself, an image from an experiment, and a clear invitation to explore further.

The point is to make the next step visible at the moment someone is ready for it.

Her About page already contains useful material, including links to her writing and YouTube channel. I would enjoy a little more of the story behind the combination of engineering and design.

How did she arrive at that intersection? What drew her toward product design? How does she decide what to build or explore outside her main work?

She does not need a long autobiography. A short account in her own voice would give the background more shape and help visitors understand the person behind these projects.

Work can earn someone’s attention first. Once they have spent time with it, there should be an easy way to satisfy the curiosity it creates.

Edna’s Playground contains plenty to explore: physical projects, coding experiments, motion, and fashion.

The range is consistent with the curiosity already visible in her case studies. Some pieces repeat work shown elsewhere, while others introduce something new.

I would give a few of those experiments more attention than they currently receive.

A small image and a brief description can introduce an object, but they may leave the viewer with several unanswered questions. What is it for? How was it made? Which parts did Edna design? What does it look like from another angle?

For the physical pieces in particular, I wanted to move closer and spend more time with them.

Some could benefit from a few additional photographs. Others might deserve a short account of how they developed, especially when the finished object suggests a process that would be worth seeing.

That does not mean turning every experiment into another full case study.

A click could open a compact overlay with larger images, a short explanation, and a few process details. A small project page could do the same where there is more to show.

The amount of detail can follow the piece.

A motion experiment may need a larger recording and one sentence explaining what Edna was trying. A physical object could need several views and a note about its construction. A coded prototype might benefit from a link that lets someone try it.

This would give visitors a way to follow their curiosity without making the initial page longer or harder to scan.

I would also consider the labels used to describe the work. “Vibe coding” can understate what a project involved. If Edna built an interactive experience or explored a product idea with AI tools, describing what she made would tell me more than the method’s shorthand.

Repetition is not a large problem. Motion from a case study can work well in a separate collection, where someone can appreciate the craft without reading the project story again.

Still, I would like to see more of the experiments that do not appear in the main work. Those give the Playground a reason to be explored after the case studies.

For a role that matched Edna’s profile, the main projects would already make a strong impression on me. The experiments could be what makes me want to hear more from her.

At the moment, some of the pieces that could prompt that conversation are presented too briefly. Edna has made things worth exploring; I would let visitors get closer to them.

Edna’s portfolio makes a strong impression through both craft and range.

Her Duolingo concept shows how closely she can work within an established product’s visual language. The technical and physical projects reveal another side of her ability, while the case studies keep the product experience understandable.

I would focus the next round of improvements on helping visitors find her About and Playground pages, then giving selected experiments enough detail to reward that visit.

There are also questions I would want to explore around business context, outcomes, and how her decisions hold up in a working product environment. Her portfolio does not answer all of those yet, which is understandable at this stage of her studies.

What it does show gives me plenty to ask about. I would want to hear her talk through the engineering work, the physical projects, and how she decides which direction an idea should take.

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