Designing Comment & UGC Community at TikTok
A 6-month product design across comments, photo-text, and community discussions
Timeline
2025 Jun - Dec (6 months)
Role
Product Design Intern
Scope
Comment Experience
UGC Community
Photo-Text Creation & Consumption
Collaborators
TikTok Foundation Team
TikTok Photo-text & UGC Team
(Include: designers, PMs, DSs, UXRs, developers, and QAs)
What is TikTok
TikTok is one of the world’s most influential content platforms, with over 1.5 billion monthly active users in 150+ countries. As a leader in short video and social media, TikTok drives emerging trends, and defines how people create, consume, and share content worldwide.
My Scope & Responsibilities
Over 6 months at TikTok, I designed systems and experiences across comments, photo-text UGC, and community interactions, balancing long-term product strategy, day-to-day iteration, and internal enablement.
My work spanned 3 core areas:
•
Core Product Initiatives
I led and contributed to strategic and exploratory initiatives that shaped how comments evolve into higher-value UGC, including system-level frameworks, early-stage explorations, and long-term design directions.
•
Daily Product Requirements & Iterations
I worked on ongoing feature delivery and experience optimization to support the stability, usability, and evolution of comment and photo-text experiences in daily product cycles.
•
Internal Tools & Workflow Improvements
I designed internal tools, diagnostics, and workflows to improve team efficiency, support cross-functional collaboration, and enable faster iteration across the product lifecycle.
Projects Overview
Core Product Initiatives
Exploration · Comment-driven UGC
Explored how comments can drive deeper expression, follow-up creation, and broader UGC participation across multiple paths.
View case study
Exploration · AI Capabilities
Explored how AI can enhance comment experiences through assisted topic filtering, improved writing quality, and lightweight engagement features.
Coming soon · Happy to discuss details directly
Specialized Optimization · Photo Comments
Systematically upgraded photo-comment experiences across feature coverage, promotion patterns, container standards, and core motions.
Coming soon · Happy to discuss details directly
Framework Design · Comment Infrastructure
Evolved the comment top-bar framework to support growing product complexity and evolving design trends, restructuring the core area around information hierarchy and scalability.
Coming soon · Happy to discuss details directly
Daily Product Requirements & Iterations
Motion Design
Optimized feed-to-detail page transitions for photo-text posts, improving immersive browsing.
Motion Design
Redesigned dual-column card expansion in Explore to unify motion across video and photo-text content, reducing visual jump and cognitive load.
UX Optimization
Improved Explore loading states by clarifying feedback and stabilizing content, reducing perceived wait time and user anxiety.
UX Optimization
Refined long-comment expansion logic to prevent accidental taps and improve reading efficiency.
UX Optimization
Optimized the layout and visual style of quick-comment components to improve click affordance and align with design trends.
Responsive Design
Adapted the new comment panel for mobile landscape mode, ensuring consistent usability across devices and orientations.
Monetization Integration
Defined guidelines for third-party ad placement within the comment area, balancing monetization needs without disrupting discussion quality.
Internal Tools & Workflow Improvements
Internal Tools
Redesigned PM data dashboards to improve information hierarchy and readability, enabling faster comparisons and day-to-day decision-making.
Process Standardization
Standardized frequent motion parameters into a one-page guideline, reducing design–engineering handoff friction, improving motion consistency, and eliminating repetitive parameter redefinition across design workflows.
Takeaways
At massive scale, small frictions are never small.
In products with hundreds of millions of users, even subtle structural and interaction decisions—such as hierarchy, motion, gestures, and transitions—can introduce meaningful friction at scale. What feels minor in isolation can become a persistent source of distraction when multiplied across daily usage.
Design decisions must be grounded in system-level signals and constraints.
In high-traffic products, design decisions cannot rely on isolated metrics or local experience alone. They must balance multiple signals, technical constraints, and long-term behavioral impact to avoid system-level regressions caused by local optimization.
High-penetration infrastructure must be scalable and timeless.
When a design framework is expected to support large-scale adoption, it must be clear, restrained, and structurally robust—not only meeting current needs, but also enabling future evolution without constant redesign.
Global products demand language-aware design decisions.
Designing for international audiences requires accounting for linguistic differences—such as long text (e.g., Russian), complex scripts, and right-to-left languages (e.g., Arabic)—early in layout, hierarchy, and interaction design.
Rapid High-fidelity prototyping accelerates decision-making in complex systems.
In multi-state, multi-path systems, high-fidelity prototypes help surface edge cases early and turn abstract discussions into tangible, experience-based validation—enabling teams to converge on better decisions faster.