Christie Yu

I’m currently a Global Future Leader at Lenovo, working from their Motorola office at Merchandise Mart in beautiful Chicago. GFL is a rotational position — in my current role, I am a UX architect, working on defining & standardizing Lenovo’s new unified design language, Cake, with systemic infrastructure like design patterns, tokens, pipelines, etc. using Figma.

I care about a lot of things when it comes to my professional work.

First, I love working with people. I thrive in spaces where I can bridge the problems of interdisciplinary teams. At the Yale Daily News, I worked with a board of 50 editors to produce output daily, speaking with people from dozens of desks in order to tie everything in a neat newspaper package at 2 a.m every night. In my first year of college, I founded Amoriem Labs, Yale’s only game development studio, which bridges programming, art, storywriting, and music talent to create original game titles. None of us — the 300+ members that came and went under my leadership, or our 9 officers — knew a thing about professional game development. We just worked together, using our knowledge from different fields, to solve problems — and “failing fast” when things didn’t work out. It was a really special process of collaborative discovery, and I treasure my memories from that time very much.

Second, I am passionate about efficient & evocative product design. As a UX designer at Lenovo, when I redesign apps like Vantage, which has over 3.3 million daily usership, I’m not just repainting it with different colors; I am actively optimizing the minutia of interactions people have to go through daily. Can I cut out the middle man? Are our flows bloated? And, it's critical to me that I not lose sight of the forest for the trees. I have felt most constructive when successfully championing real user enjoyment of a product over a bottom line, using data-driven evidence. User experience pays for itself! When I was part of the tech incubation team at Memoral Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, I transitioned their entire patient survey base, with over 180k users and 1.5 million entries, into intelligent conversational format using IBM Watson. During that process, I thought very deeply about the actual "value add" of an AI personality to our company mission — allowing the tool to really advocate for itself in C-suite meetings.

Third, I really enjoy when I can explain things to people well. In summer of 2020, I put together a fundraising project called Summer Reading Series with Christie, where I taught 70+ middle and high school students advanced college-level English readings for charity (we raised $26,000+ after a generous 5x match from CARE!). In the Yale Daily News production room, I put together clarifying visuals for articles in a snap each night. At MSKCC, I must have created more than 10 slide decks of 50+ slides explaining things to audiences from my fellow interns to C-suite executives. And for three years I taught CS50 (Introductory CS) to hundreds of people at Yale, including graduate students much older than me. I think if you really understand something, you should have no problem explaining it to people from all walks of life. That lesson was instilled in me all the way back in high school, when I explained novel methods in mRNA ribosome profiling to post-docs at a research symposium, curious college interviewers, and even my parents, who don't speak English!

Through these experiences, I’ve thought a lot about what I want to do in life — not just big milestones I want to achieve, but how I want to live my life each day. I want to talk to many people and meet many people every single day. I want to make beautiful, well-designed products that people genuinely like. Whenever I learn something important and interesting, I want to explain it to people in a way that gets them excited and passionate too.

Thank you for taking the time to get to know a little bit about me and my work. I'm always happy to chat – say hello at christieyu@aya.yale.edu!