Yutong Xue is a staff product designer at Meta. She has previously worked at Google and worked with various startups. She has worked on products like Google’s Pixel phone, Pixel watch, Meta’s Workplace and enterprise products, and most recently working on the Metaverse.
During her time at Meta and Google, Yutong has led multiple efforts to rethink overall product IAs, and solving other system level problems. She is passionate about coming up with shared frameworks and standards that can increase overall consistency and cohesion in user experience.
As Usability professionals, our focus is often in the details. We might be focused on the elements of a page, an interaction or a specific user path. As a result the mind-blowing potential and the grandeur that gets us excited and ignites our passions for the project gets foggy in the rear view mirror. Constraints on timelines, product owner personality, and the powerless loop of minor details distracts us from the hint of a higher purpose. That’s when we begin to miss the microaggressions. Those happening in the standup between developers, coming from project leaders and managers, and the assumptions between creative teams that appear to be potholes in the creative visioning process rather than anything we really need to pay attention to. As a result we build something that feels familiar, impersonal and “Blah”. Who is daring to ask, if we’re building something new, as designers, as citizens, how can it be a nurturing, protective, and supportive environment that encourages engagement! How do we evolve from our obsession with base level content engagement and use our raised awareness to help usher culture into the flat, transparent environment we’ve observed a peak in over the last 2 years. Join me for a presentation that uses a working, iterative User Experience research method as a vehicle to ascend the levels of social justice work from reality, to justice. You will discover how you can use this toolkit to empower yourself and impact your projects, making them more conscious, more equitable and evolved.
