Yueling “Linda” Lai is an aspiring Senior Product Designer at TikTok, the global social media giant with hundreds of millions of active users, playing a pivotal role on a platform that is not only a cultural symbol for the younger generation but also an undisputed leader in the short video domain. TikTok wields significant influence in content creation and has demonstrated strong commercial potential and global strategic capability in advertising and e-commerce.
On such a platform with significant global influence and commercial value, Yueling Lai’s work encompasses the strategic planning and execution of global advertising and e-commerce product design. Her role is not only to consider how to enhance user experience through design but also to ensure that advertising and e-commerce solutions are adaptable and effective across more than 20 languages and more than 30 countries. This responsibility is particularly crucial, as any product or service launched on TikTok immediately impacts hundreds of millions of users, generating substantial social and economic effects.
Yueling Lai has successfully integrated business objectives with user experience in such a highly competitive and diversified environment, demonstrating her high level of professionalism and influence in global product strategy and design.
Yueling Lai has led the design of a series of innovative, industry-leading products and experiences at TikTok. One of the most notable of these is that Linda led the end-to-end design of TikTok’s brand-new automated ad product. Powered by advanced artificial intelligence technology and machine learning, it features automated ad creation flow, ads generation, smart delivery, and creative-focused insights. With efficient user experience design, the product helps advertisers focus on creative making, rather than cumbersome manual optimization. an automated advertising solution driven by advanced artificial intelligence technology. This project represents a significant technological breakthrough, utilizing highly precise AI algorithms to automate the optimization and targeting of ad creatives, thereby greatly enhancing advertising effectiveness and return on investment.
More importantly, this AI-driven automated advertising solution deeply considers the needs of business users and leverages machine learning to optimize for best performance and marketing goals to help businesses and advertisers achieve the best results with minimal manual steps and high efficiency. Through such comprehensive and detailed design considerations, the project has very high universality and applicability on a global scale, achieving high user acceptance and commercial success in both Western and Eastern countries.
Yueling Lai makes significant contributions at TikTok by building meaningful product experiences that serve users and businesses across the globe and different cultures. Outside of work, she is also a multi-award-winning designer who explores cross-cultural design boundaries in the digital landscape.
Renowned designer Yueling Lai has been making waves in the design community, most notably with her participation in the XYG Window project. This groundbreaking project, which masterfully blends Eastern and Western elements in modern interactive design, has garnered multiple prestigious global design awards, including the Red Dot Award, A’ Design Awards, and the International Design Excellence Award (IDEA). These accolades underscore the project’s significance in the realm of “award-winning designs” and pave the way for a deeper discussion on cultural exchange in design.
Fusing elements from ancient Eastern literati with modernity, XYG Window is a visual identity and interaction design project that demonstrates the feasibility of creating modern visual communication based on traditional art and cultures.
In modern digital visual and interface design, the diverse styles from various traditional cultures around the world are gradually converging into a single universal visual language: modern UI design. However, the visual diversity rooted in different cultures and histories is progressively fading from user interface design as the digital age advances.
Yueling believes, ‘As designers, we feel obligated to break through this limitation and help improve the visual diversity in modern visual and interaction design.’ Therefore, this project was created to enrich the visual diversity in modern digital design and ensure that cultural elements are better preserved in the modern age.
This cross-cultural design direction has not only increased the global influence of her work but has also made a meaningful contribution to promoting the exchange and understanding between different cultures and aesthetics around the world. Through such design practices, Yueling Lai has successfully applied the concept of multicultural integration to practical product design, becoming a beautiful highlight in the global design community.
For the future, Yueling Lai has a detailed and ambitious development blueprint. She plans not only to delve deeper into research and innovation in art and design but also to focus on how to successfully integrate Eastern design elements and cultural values into modern design practices. Her goal is to address a broader spectrum of complex global social and cultural issues through such cultural and design integration. To achieve this goal, she intends to collaborate with various cultural organizations and design academies, including but not limited to organizing workshops, seminars, and exchange programs. This will not only facilitate the exchange between Eastern and Western design and art but also provide new perspectives and solutions for addressing global design challenges.
More specifically, Yueling Lai plans to publish a series of academic papers and case studies in the coming years on the application of Eastern design elements in modern design. She also plans to initiate an international research project themed “Cultural Inclusivity in Modern Design Applications.” Through these systematic and long-term efforts, Lai hopes to further promote and apply her innovative ideas in design, especially those that foster cultural exchange and address social issues. She believes that such diverse and inclusive design philosophies will not only advance the field of design but will also have a profound impact on a wider socio-cultural spectrum.
