Today’s Tech Role Model is Ethelia Lung. Ethelia is a Chinese Interaction Designer at YouTube. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, but she’s originally from Hong Kong. She moved to the States for university and have been here since, working in her dream career. Outside of work, Ethelia likes to write, explore food places, and make things with her hands.
I’m an Interaction Designer, and I’ve been in this role for around 10 months.
I love that design is a vehicle for so many things: education, communication, innovation, and more. My role allows me to translate research and user needs into an interactive application and/or use case.
I get to work a little bit before 8 am, and take an hour or so to answer emails and look at my to-do list for the day.
I work through my tasks in between meetings. These tasks are typically comprised of status updates, discussions, and reviews, and I have them throughout my work day.
Lunch is usually between 11:30 and 1:30. Sometimes we have team lunches at a bi-weekly cadence.
My focus is on digital design, and in particular screen design, so software that help me achieve those deliverables are what’s in my arsenal – from the Adobe suite to Sketch to Figma.
I also have experience in other design areas ranging from 3D design to motion graphics design, as well as front-end development areas such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
I think what’s helped me the most is the variety of “skill sets” I’ve touched, thanks to explorations when I was younger and more carefree, and academia.
Being at a large company means there are resources to conduct research and respond to larger issues from a more informed perspective!
Communication is incredibly important. There are so many people on the project team, and projects will likely touch other stakeholders company wide. It took me quite a while to really understand the wider processes and how to navigate the workflows here.
There’s also the fun challenge of creating within some incredible constraints (we’re working on a huge, 13-year-old app).
Oh man, job interview question!
In general, the teams I’m on meet weekly (could include engineers, designers, project manager, programme manager, researcher, and product specialist) to talk about updates on our quarterly goals and any issues that came up.
An important collaboration that went down was between a designer on another team, my teams technical programme manager (TPgM) and I. I made a website powered by a Google Sheet and Firebase based on the work of that designer, and worked with the TPgM to ensure that we could pull the right data into the site.
It’s hard to pick one, since there are so many things I want to be better at.
Leadership and handling ambiguity, helping my design skills flourish more, picking up new dev skills, and being more involved in the design community.
There are also personal things that I want to address, which aren’t directly related to my job but will complement how well I do it, such as insecurities and managing all my interests without burning out.
Humility, honesty, and curiosity are really important, but I hesitate to say there are personality traits tied to succeeding in any job.
DEFINITELY communication, documentation, and patience; especially with expressing my opinions, knowing when to speak up, and how to prioritise my workload.
I’m pretty new but my impression is that people who are able to make a positive impact in their area, whether that’s internal to the company or brings new insights to the wider design community.
It’s difficult to define a metric because this field morphs so quickly, but at the heart of it, I feel like it comes down to helping to advance others.