As a Director of Design, I have had the privilege of working with a number of talented and dedicated product designers. One of my most recent teammates, Gina Yu, has been a stand-out in both her design work and her support of the team’s culture and well-being.
Gina's contributions have been exceptional. She was central to the creation of a process for checking design accessibility in Pear Deck, which has not only improved the overall quality of the design of the product, but has also helped to make all products more inclusive and accessible to a wider audience. Her focus on integrating NPS as a way of measuring the performance of her designs has provided valuable insights into the success of our user experience and has helped us make data-driven decisions. In addition, she ran a memorable workshop that taught our whole design team to see in a different way.
Gina's impact goes beyond just her technical skills. She has been a trusted partner to both product management and engineering, working effortlessly with diverse cross-functional partners and ensuring that her designs are both aesthetically pleasing and technically feasible. She has led the product design effort in the absence of her Lead Designer.
Her mentorship and support of early-career team members has helped to foster a positive and supportive work environment, and her ability to simply listen and give authentic, heartfelt advice has helped retain many members of our team, and been an inspiration to us all.
Finally, Gina's strong and influential voice in group discussions is truly a mark of her seniority. She often shares insights where others might struggle to choose a view. She brings a unique perspective and a passion for design that has helped to drive our team forward. Her presence will be deeply missed, but her impact on our team continues to move our team forward.
Gina worked with me for around two and a half years on a large product team in GoGuardian, focused on the Pear Deck product. I was Gina’s manager and during our time working together she developed her career from a Mid Level UX Designer to a Senior UX Designer, leading design for our student and teacher-facing features. During projects, PM and engineering often praised Gina for her communications skills and ability to align the team around project initiatives. On our team, Gina created a culture of inclusivity, openness, and communication by finding alignment for the team when there were conflicting viewpoints. Her
ability to communicate across the team and guide project initiatives was critical to the happiness of our team and the success of our product design and development.
Outside of leading design initiatives, Gina worked closely with our Senior User Researcher. Gina partnered with research to define research plans, set up testing, and conduct user interviews. Gina shows a mastery of skills when planning and running user research, and I found her research synthesis to be invaluable to improving our products. Outside of research, Gina is a skilled designer and open to continuous learning. She worked hard to learn CSS and
HTML to help better communicate with developers and own part of the build process on several projects. Additionally, when the product went through an accessibility review, Gina partnered with our Senior Developer to learn more about accessibility in design and led initiatives to improve our accessibility across our product.
Designers outside of our product also looked to Gina as a leader. She mentored several designers on the broader GoGuardian team, discussing with them how they could further their careers and how to work toward professional growth. Gina's guidance led many designers to advance in their careers and expand their growth opportunities.
I can't say enough good things about Gina. I've been lucky to have worked with her over the years, and any company would benefit from having her on their team. Please feel free to reach out to me to learn more.
Gina is one of the most engaged UX designers I’ve worked with. She has the skills to utilize research for tactical product iterations, longer term exploratory discussions, and combining the two for deeper UX strategy discussions. This takes someone who is very experienced in the UX field and Gina does this really well.
In addition, Gina always steps up to participate in research; from planning, to sitting in on sessions, synthesizing data, and suggestions on follow up research—Gina always volunteers because she wants to be immersed in this continuous user-centric mindset, something that Pear Deck really needs. She leads by always connecting ideas and thoughts to past data, and stirring up new discussion and ideation from that. In addition, she has that rare skill to always make folks in the room very comfortable, which leads to even more productive sharing and contribution. I am confident saying that Gina constantly facilitates UX and product lightbulb moments.
I collaborated with Gina frequently in my role as Director of Engineering at Pear Deck. Gina embodies many qualities that make her an extremely valuable member of a team, including: creativity, determination, flexibility, integrity, and accountability.
The team leaned on Gina to understand large swaths of the product, user personas, workflows and interactions, and to have deep knowledge of design and user experience topics. There were even some portions of the product design, and points of user interactivity where Gina was the singular context holder.
We had great trust in Gina to come up with solid UX solutions to open ended problems and to design high quality, effective designs. Gina always showed an exceptional aptitude for learning engineering concepts and interfacing with the engineering team on design and implementation. Gina enjoyed pairing with engineers and applying her experience to holistic product solutions—designing robust, effective, resilient and scalable solutions in technically innovative ways. Furthermore, Gina shows natural leadership in the way that she activates, inspires, motivates and partners with team members. Gina always maintains enough context and understanding to be able to support, advocate for and make decisions around projects, even when they are being executed by others. Gina can identify the strengths in her teammates and can activate and apply their skills effectively in the projects she participates in.
Gina brought order and confidence to the team. She facilitated keeping the team on track, and proactively sought to unblock the team as they executed.Gina dedicated herself to the education and support of new and less experienced team members. From pairing sessions, to knowledge sharing sessions, to peer 1:1s, Gina was extremely generous with her time for others and never hesitated to connect.
Gina did a great job of understanding her own capacity and trying to manage her time and commitments. Though sometimes I could see that she was still taking on too much or pushing herself hard, I also saw her drawing boundaries and setting realistic expectations. I always appreciated Gina’s self awareness, openness to discuss boundaries, and to partner on changes and improvements to manage her workload.
Lastly, Gina may be one of the most emotionally mature and disciplined individuals I’ve worked with. Gina always leads with honesty and follows through with accountability. I have gotten more direct, concrete, fair and balanced feedback from Gina than almost anyone else in my career. Gina wants to roll up her sleeves, talk real talk, seek solutions together and work toward the better path for everyone involved. I have come to highly value Gina as an advisor, despite our difference in seniority/position/role in this company.
Gina is the heart of any team. She certainly operates at a level above others. I enthusiastically recommend Gina–she will work amazing magic for any team.
Since joining as an engineer on the Pear Deck team, I have learned a lot personally from Gina over the past couple of months. I want to specifically speak to two things I've experienced in interacting with her and observing Gina in meetings. First and foremost, Gina has demonstrated time and again her ability to understand the current issues facing students/teachers, and solutions to help improve their overall experience with our product. Gina does a great job at collaborating, seeking input from engineering when needed, and keeping students/teachers as the focal point of all our discussions.
Secondly, Gina possesses great emotional intelligence, which has been great in regards to helping our team stay focused on specific tasks/goals in recent meetings. During a recent meeting, there were a lot of debates and conversations which started to take our meeting in an unproductive direction. Realizing this, Gina jumped in and helped to steer the team back in the right direction while also showing empathy and considerations for various stakeholder concerns. This resulted in a very beneficial and productive meeting overall.
Gina insists on high standards and always produces excellent and clear designs. She is collaborative when solving problems and considers the perspectives and thoughts of the project team. Additionally, she is communicative with all stakeholders, ensures that they are up to date on her
progress, and reaches out when she needs their input, which builds a strong sense of trust on the team. Furthermore, she is very helpful when engineers have questions and is eager to jump in and unblock them. She is also a significant booster of morale and advocates getting to know people on a personal level which makes distributed remote work feel more cohesive and team oriented.
Gina is an empathetic user advocate, communicative collaborator, and transformative UX designer and leader.
When it comes to designing solutions, Gina is able to uncover the root issues of problems and thoughtfully brainstorms and prioritizes ways to solve these problems, effectively partnering with product, engineering, and quality assurance to propose solutions that advocate for user needs while balancing business goals.
She has been so instrumental in creating a UX culture that has created a safe space for other designers, allowing them to share honestly while pushing them to become better in their craft and partnership with cross functional teammates.
She is always willing to collaborate with other designers, whether that be in design critiques, participating in a mentorship initiative, being a mentor, or leading UX team meetings.
I’m confident that in any team or product she is placed in, she will make it better.
Gina has been an unparalleled UX partner, whose collaboration has been invaluable.
Her ability to communicate clearly, identify and articulate risks, and consistently prioritize the enhancement of user experience has set a new standard for teamwork and innovation in our projects.
Her innate talent for design yields interfaces that are not only visually appealing but also intuitively simple, embodying the epitome of clean and obvious design principles.
Feedback on her work consistently highlights her ability to craft operational flows that are both straightforward and meticulously considered, significantly contributing to our project's success.
Her attention to detail and personality have not only made our product releases and experimentation processes smoother but have also uplifted our team's spirit and productivity.
I cannot overstate the impact of her contributions to our work.
Working without her would have been a significantly more challenging endeavor, and I'm grateful to get to work with a designer of her caliber.