Roll Call: Zoe + Matt + Sijia
Yelp’s Product Design team consists of many talented folks who work on all facets of Yelp products. Each month, we’re sharing their stories.
Zoe Lu
Favorite business on Yelp:
Equinox Sports Club in San Francisco, CA
Where were you before Yelp?
I’m a designer with combined experience in interaction design and industrial design. I got my bachelor’s degree in Beijing as an industrial designer. I moved to the U.S. and focused on interaction design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating last year in May as an MFA student. I interned at Yelp as product designer in the summer and got the return offer, so I came back and have been here full-time for almost a year!
What product do you work on? What challenges is your team up against?
I work on the Transactions team at Yelp. Our mission is to make Yelp the leader in local transactions. Currently, that means I’m working on improving on various of aspects of the Yelp product, like our food ordering experience, the Yelp Cash Back program, and our NoWait waitlist feature. Some challenges our team faces include: growing user awareness and transactions, building, maintaining, and scaling transactional infrastructure, delivering delightful experiences for users to transact with local businesses, and onboarding new partners to doing business on Yelp.
If you weren’t a Product Designer, what would you be doing?
I think I’d be an actress or dancer. I still want to stay in some creative field. I’m the type of person who’s naturally adventurous, and curious about new opportunities all the time. Based on different scripts, characters, environments, I can portray different roles to express my interpretation of a story and experience the vicissitudes of life.
What advice do you have for a younger self?
Have goals you’re passionate about, always be excited for challenges, and never stop learning. Oh, and work out more often! It can help you stay healthy and energetic.
Matt Baird
Favorite business on Yelp:
Snowland Gingerbread House at Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls, ON (we test title edge cases with this business and it makes me happy every time)
Who do you look up to as a mentor in your life?
I actually have two mentors: my previous boss, Jason Locke, and my current design partner-in-crime, Amy Ton. Without Jason, I wouldn’t be here today. He not only saw potential in me that few others saw, but he also cemented my passion for design. We didn’t work together for all that long, and even though we now live on opposite ends of the country, we still keep in touch. Amy, on the other hand, is my peer mentor. We started within 2 weeks of each other and have sat next to each other ever since. Since she’s incredibly talented and easy to talk to, we’re constantly discussing projects, team culture, our careers, life, etc. I doubt either of them would be able to guess I’d list them as mentors here. I’m glad I’m able to give them a shout out for the profound impact they’ve had on my career.
What product do you work on? What challenges is your team up against?
Yelp Reservations! I’m mostly focused on restaurant-facing design, whether that’s marketing collateral or our front-of-house iPad product. Occasionally, I shift focus to consumer-facing marketing and/or product design. A month after starting on this team, I ran into an OpenTable designer at a holiday party (stay with me, I promise this is relevant). He was super jolly and excited to meet another designer, but when I told him where I worked and the team I was on, he morphed into a rival instantaneously. In good fun, he said something along the lines of, “Welcome to the arena, good luck.” This is an arena OpenTable has been dominating for years, so I promptly thanked him. Going up against them will always be challenging because they’ve been a standard for such a long time. That said, I think his wish for good luck is paying off since we now have half of the market share in San Francisco.
What new problems excite you?
Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in general is fascinating, as is artificial intelligence in its many forms. Basically anything leading to the Singularity is going to induce some sort of excitement from me. The world definitely needs talented designers for all of this stuff.
If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?
If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be a drummer in (at least) a semi-successful touring metal band by now. I could have been in a van with a handful of other smelly dudes this very instant … what was I thinking?
Sijia Wang
Favorite business on Yelp:
Alchemy Collective Cafe in Berkeley
What product do you work on? What challenges is your team up against?
I work on the Reader Experience (RX) team. The primary goal of RX is to facilitate and optimize for the best way for consumers on Yelp to do what they came to do — consume content. Though typically people equate Yelp with reviews, there are quite a number of features and types of content on Yelp. Thus, a big challenge for my team is understanding which of those pieces of content are most valuable to people who come to Yelp looking for information, and more specifically to design, how to represent the information in ways that are easy to parse and easy to understand.
What’s a day in the life like for you at Yelp?
It’s not emphasized enough how much of of a designer’s day is spent not designing, or actively designing. Typically, I spend an hour or two of my morning planning the day — reading and answering emails, looking at JIRA tickets & docs, getting a sense what’s urgent and prioritizing based on a variety of factors. At Yelp, product designers build end-to-end experiences, so usually my day involves one or more meetings with various members of my team (PMs, engineers, stakeholders) regarding the project I’m working on. Right now, that’s bookmarking on Yelp. Throughout my day, I’m also meeting with other designers either for critique or process-related discussions. The rest is spent ‘designing’ — which can mean pushing pixels or prototyping a mock, thinking about workarounds for constraints, putting out fires when a design is going live, or open-ended design explorations.
Did you ever decide, “I’m going to be a designer?”
At some point, yes, but definitely not what I originally studied in college. My life’s purpose hinged dangerously between film director and lawyer for a time. Though it was a bit of an unexpected path, product design has become a truly rewarding career.
Feeling inspired to get to know us a little better? Look us up on Dribbble, and if you’ve got the design chops and are passionate about local businesses, check out current openings for the Yelp Product Design team at yelp.com/careers.
