Lemon8 Notes Tab Optimization
Role
Product Designer Intern (Worked as the sole designer on this project)
Timeline
Aug-Sep 2025
Team
TikTok Design, Global Community Product
Tools
Figma
Background
Lemon8 is a lifestyle community app powered by TikTok, where users can discover and share authentic content on a variety of topics such as beauty, fashion, travel, food, and more.
To attract more creators and user's long-term retention, the team launched Notes in early 2025. Notes lowered the barrier to posting by removing the pressure of perfect cover images or polished captions, enabling more spontaneous, everyday expression.
Understanding the Problem
Currently, the Notes layout displays an average of only 1.5–2.5 notes per screen. User impressions rely heavily on the recommendation feed, if the first few notes fail to capture interest, users are likely to disengage… 😫
Besides improving notes card height, I identified several related design issues such as profile follow visibility, interaction hierarchy, and image layout—that collectively called for a level revamp.
Design Showcase
Higher screen efficiency, increased user interactions
Learn from Competitors
Multi-dimensional competitive analysis across 5+ leading products
Card Padding
Identified scalable padding guidelines for multiple content layouts
Design Iteration Strategy
Key Solutions
01 Prioritize content immersion
Enlarging imagery to effortlessly increase preview area encouraged users to view the content better, allowing deeper exploration.
The improved design brought visual engagement and led to higher likes and reposts. Although comment interactions decreased slightly, the overall impact on content engagement was positive.
02 Strengthen identity-driven interaction
Reorganize profile placement to surface creator identity in the reading flow, reinforcing social presence and increasing interaction intent through clearer user recognition.
Significant lift in follow rate, and user profile click through rate, positively impacting overall Notes content consumption.
03 Prioritize content immersion
Adopt a flatter content structure by tightening spacing between key elements (username, text, media), allowing more content to appear per screen while maintaining readability.
04 Preserve & enhance interaction bar
Ensure layout optimizations do not weaken existing interaction behaviors (like, comment, share), and where possible, subtly reinforce clickability through clearer hierarchy and placement.
Both variants experienced small decreases ☹️ in likes and comments, while reposts increased slightly 1.29% in V2 compared to the controlled group.
Additional Works
Other designs I did at Lemon8…
My Takeaways
Design changes often introduce trade-offs & shifts
Through hands-on experimentation, I learned to evaluate designs beyond UI comparison, using event-level data to understand impact, validate decisions, and guide future optimization. Along with skills of aligning potential changes to metrics of designing test groups with PMs in advances.
Structured communication & thinking
While presenting design ideas, I learned to focus on key points, articulate logic clearly, and aligning rationale with analysis. This improved both my decision-making and the clarity of my design explanations.
Be prepared in reviews to explain full context
Effective communication goes beyond presentation templates—it requires a clear understanding of the problem. Preparing context, logic, and updates ahead of reviews enabled more thoughtful responses, deeper discussion, and clearer decision-making.