Hi! I'm Li Yi
Nothing brings me greater joy and a sense of fulfilment than creating intuitive designs. I value add to applications and services and aim to make users go "Woah, I can't go back to being without this!". Being adaptable and empathetic helps me identify best practices to employ based on user needs.
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I am currently a product designer at The Straits Times, ideating and designing new features for our application and website.
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In my free time, I enjoy attending ACG events to share my crafts!
AI Chatbot
Role: Product Designer
Timeline: January 2025 - March 2025
The Straits Times is a reliable and reputable source of news for Singaporeans. In today’s competitive and ever changing job market, we want readers to receive timely and relevant career advice from us.
Through use of this AI-powered service, we aim to enhance reader engagement, increase viewership and boost registration numbers.
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I led and worked with one designer in this project, helping to manage design requirements, make decisions on flow and UX, and designing web screens.
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The Problem Space
​There is a treasure trove of up to date, important news announcements and valuable question and answer information from our expert correspondents in our job section. Users would be able to search for and be stay informed by reading articles in this page. Additionally, The Straits Times archive is vast yet it is not user friendly to search for specific content in this section.
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What we aimed to do was better leverage the content available, add an engagement quality for our users and have a place where Singaporeans can get direct answers on their career related questions. An AI chatbot was decided as the approach to close the gap between users and our content.
Jobs section on The Straits Times
Requirements, Scoping and The Design Process
One requirement was to use AWS generative AI technology to come up with responses based on a user query, pulling relevant data from our extensive article list. With AWS, we were able to add in features including links to original article sources and even customise the tone of voice of responses.​
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Working within our team, we had various discussions to better understand how the AWS technology works so as to best adapt the features into one cohesive design.
Throughout this process, there were requirements that changed and iterations of designs that had to be adjusted. As we got feedback from stakeholders at different stages of the project, our design workflow allowed us to update the design easily. The previous versions were then either archived or moved to a phase 2 stage where we could use in the future.
An initial requirements was limit the number of messages for anonymous users
Results and Learnings
This project had a short timeline, with only a little over 2 months to design and develop. With a limited span of time, critical tasks were prioritised while minor tasks and improvements were shifted to a future development phase.
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Through working on this feature, there were struggles encountered such as having additional requirements as development was ongoing. This was managed through discussions with our product managers, and I believe we made the best decision we could based on each requirement to not delay the development timeline.
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As part of the design team, we had to work swiftly to adjust the designs, with careful consideration to not disrupt the existing flows too much, as that will also lead to delays. With the timeline we had, I am proud of my team to have been able to deliver the product with no major issue.
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The live chatbot site can be accessed here, feel free to give it a try! A feedback form is also included to gather user responses for future improvements.
The Straits Times Live Blog
Role: Product Designer
Timeline: July 2024 - October 2024
The Straits Times live blog key way to provide live updates for ongoing news. Journalists are able to provide updates through a CMS which show as posts on the live blog website.
Live blogs are used mainly for large scale news events. Major events covered through live blogs included the US Presidential Elections, the 2024 Paris Olympics and Singapore’s 2025 General Elections.
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I worked in a team with two other designers to create screens and prototypes for this project.
The Problem Space
Live blogs are a great way for journalists to get their stories out through posts which can be quickly published to the live site visible to the public. While the base template had no major issues, we believed there was much potential to capture users and bring more value to the live blog experience.
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Based on user reading habits, various improvements and quality of life features were proposed and discussed. We considered the impact on journalists workflow and ease of use, as to not majorly affect their work flow and processes.
Live Blog before redesign
Research and Ideation
Multiple ideas and suggestions were put forth for features to build. Considerations included the potential value added when it came to user engagement, views and ease of use for the journalists in the news room.
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Various ideas were floated, and the team settled on the following features to be worked on further:
→ Multi video support, used when there are more than one video to be showcased during an event. This feature contained a sticky mini player where users can still view a currently playing video while scrolling the blog.
→ A "New Update" toast notification which indicates to the user when there is a new post, which they can click to navigate them back to the top.
→ Introduction of the breaking news tag, showing users exactly which posts are the ones to look out for with crucial information.
→ Drop down selection for multi-day blogs, allowing users to navigate to specific dates of important events for ease of further reading.
→ A key summary, allowing users to quickly gain context of the entire event in a short amount of time. This feature included a collapse and expand functionality which we tracked to measure engagement.
Iteration of screens created and specs were defined
Design Process
We started with explorations for the features, researching on industry best practices, referencing what has already been done, and analysing what we can do better. We did this exploration process for each feature idea we had, which we documented and presented to product managers and stakeholders.
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After the initial research, key flows and interactions were considered and decided on, after which we worked to create multiple versions using wireframe screens and refined them.
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Every set of design screens iterated and created included a round of feedback, which we took and worked to improve.
Research was conducted and analysis was done for each feature
Impact and Metrics
Post launch, the features were activated on a live blog and metrics such as session duration, views and interactions of users were tracked using Google Analytics.
What we discovered was the average live blog session duration per user improved by 50%, views per user improved by 60%, total views improved by 20 - 50k, and there was heavy usage on the key summary feature. This was comparing data to the previous live blogs published.
The live blog features also helped to improve the quality of life for journalists and providing them with more options and flexibility in their job.
Outcomes and Reflection
Hearing the successes of features in a product I worked on is an amazing feeling, motivating me to do even better in future iterations. Under the guidance of an experienced design team allowed me to practice and grow my skills in research, creating user flows in a conducive environment, thanks to my design team.
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If there is an opportunity to further work on features for the live blog, I would like to be more involved in the ideation phase as I have better understand the use case and have more user knowledge.
User Workshops
Role: Facilitator
Closer to Community Workshop: June 2024
AI Sentiment Workshop: April 2025
The Straits Times product team conducts user engagement workshops with readers to better understand user sentiments and gain user insights on proposed and planned features.
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Being a product designer in The Straits Times, I participated in two workshops as a facilitator, showing, explaining and guiding users through workshop content and gathering feedback, asking probing questions to further understand their opinions, thoughts and comments.
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Workshop Goals
Every workshop begins with a theme and goal. In this case study, I will focus on the AI sentiment workshop, which happened more recently in April 2025. The goal of this workshop was to understand the use of AI in our reader's daily life, as well as gather feedback on their sentiments towards the use of AI in digital news consumption.
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With the guidance of our lead UX researcher who led the planning with her expertise, I was in charge of providing materials and assets for the concept testing part of the workshop. This included features which are currently in development, where the designs and prototypes were created by my team.
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Participants engaging in activities relating to the workshop goal
Role in Facilitation
The workshop participants got to try out AI features which we have planned for release as well as existing AI features in news related context in a hands-on experiential lab.
My role was to explain each feature at my station, observe, ask and take notes. Asking further questions can help open them up to sharing more about their experience and gain feedback. Participants expressions can give crucial information on how they feel at different points. Asking the right questions, especially when noticing points of frustration or delight, is a good way to gain deeper insights to their thinking.
After experiencing the feature, participants are tasked to rank it on the following scales: Trust, Usefulness, and Improving their experience.
Participants penning their thoughts during an activity
Gathering Valuable User Insights
​At the end of each user workshop, the information gathered are compiled and synthesised, with the help of our lead UX researcher. In this stage, I contribute by providing context to the notes and comments taken and my observations of participants during the overall session.
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For each feature, an overview of what works, does not work and list of improvements are laid out, conveying the overall sentiments of our participants. This information is crucial to us, as we now better understand what our user pain points and is important to them.
A wall filled with notes regarding how they use AI / Gen AI today
Outcomes and Reflection
The opportunity of being a facilitator is definitely a worthwhile one. The insights I have from our UX researcher goes from the variety and types of activities to plan, down to the granular learnings. The importance of good facilitation skills which allows participants to feel comfortable and asking the right questions are both skills that have to be practiced.
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I thoroughly enjoyed the role of being a facilitator and would definitely want to join more future workshops. A goal of mine is to be able to run one of these workshops myself, if given the chance.
