I used to roll my eyes at the thought of it.

Watching people send digital roses and cartoon cars to a stranger on a screen felt, well, a little cringey. It was a behavior I couldn’t quite understand, something that seemed frivolous and even a little desperate. I had a clear-cut, if uninformed, opinion: it was just a way for creators to get paid and for fans to waste money on something that didn’t provide tangible value.

Then, I got a job as a Product Manager on the livestreaming team at TikTok.

Suddenly, I wasn’t just a passive observer anymore. My job was to dive deep into the very systems I once judged, to understand the motivations behind every tap, every comment, and yes, every digital gift. My mission was to uncover the ‘why’ behind user behavior, and what I found completely shattered my previous biases.

I discovered that livestream gifting isn’t about transactions. It’s a powerful, multifaceted social behavior, driven by a deep-seated human desire for connection and recognition.

Here’s what I learned about the secret language of digital gifts.

The Gift as a Social Tip

Think about the last time you had a truly excellent waiter. Maybe they were funny, attentive, and made your dining experience special. When the check comes, you don’t just pay the bill — you leave a tip. It’s an unspoken social contract, a way of saying, “I see your hard work, and I appreciate it.”

Livestream gifting is the digital equivalent of that tip.

In a livestream, a creator is working in real time. They’re providing entertainment, emotional support, and a sense of community. The gift is a way for a fan to say, “Thank you. Your content is valuable, and I’m grateful for the effort you’re putting in.” It’s a direct, immediate, and visible form of appreciation that goes beyond a simple “like” or “comment.”

The Illusion of Proximity

In a one-to-many broadcast, it’s easy to feel like just another face in the crowd. There might be thousands of viewers, and the creator can’t possibly respond to every single person.

But a gift changes the dynamic completely.

When a user sends a gift, their name and avatar pop up on the screen, often with an audible or visual flourish. The creator will often call out their username and say, “Thank you so much, [username]!”

That simple acknowledgment is incredibly powerful. For a brief moment, the distance between the viewer and the creator disappears. The fan isn’t just a number anymore; they are seen, heard, and appreciated. It transforms a passive viewer into an active participant, and for many, that feeling of being noticed is worth more than the cost of the gift itself.

The Power of Gamification and Status

If you’ve spent any time on a livestream, you’ve probably noticed the leaderboards — lists of “Top Donors” or “Top Fans” for a particular stream or week. This is no accident. The system is designed to tap into our innate desire for status and recognition.

Gifting isn’t just about giving. It’s about what that gift signifies within the community.

• A user who gives regularly might unlock special badges next to their name.
• They might get a different colored username in the chat.
• They might be recognized by the creator as a dedicated “mod” or “super fan.”

These are visual and social representations of a user’s contribution and dedication. It’s about earning your place in the community, and for many, competing for that top spot on the leaderboard is a compelling part of the experience. It’s a game with real-world social rewards.

A Shared Social Ritual

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, gifting is a form of community building.

When one person sends a big gift, it often creates a chain reaction. The excitement in the chat builds. Other fans might send smaller gifts to join in the momentum. It’s a collective cheer for the creator, a way for the community to show their unified support.

In this way, the gift isn’t just from one person to another. It’s a shared social ritual that reinforces the bonds within the fan base. It’s a way for people who might be spread across the globe to feel like they are “on the same team,” supporting the person who brings them together.

My PM Perspective

From a Product Manager’s perspective, we don’t just see gifting as a revenue stream. We see it as an indicator of engagement, loyalty, and community health. We see a direct correlation between gifting behavior and the depth of a user’s connection to a creator and a community.

We meticulously design the feedback loops — the instant creator reaction, the visual pop of the gift on screen, the placement on the leaderboard — to reinforce that feeling of connection and acknowledgment. We are building systems that facilitate human-to-human interaction, even if it’s mediated through a screen.

So, the next time you see a flurry of digital gifts on a livestream, don’t roll your eyes. Instead, see it for what it truly is: a modern-day form of appreciation, a silent cheer from the crowd, and a powerful symbol of human connection in our increasingly digital world. The cringe I once felt was just a misunderstanding of a behavior that is, at its core, deeply human.

The Psychology of Livestream Gifting was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My team at work organises weekly sharing sessions where we each take turns to share about an external product and how we can improve it based on the given topic. It was my turn to share last week on how to improve the Netflix Kids experience for parents. Thought it would be nice to pen my thoughts down here on Medium as well, so here goes!

Kids, and Parents as a Target Audience

It’s easy to see why Netflix would choose to focus on kids and parents as one of their key audiences.

“About half of Netflix’s 75 million members regularly watch kids’ movies or TV shows, but the potential for long-term profits runs much deeper. If the site is able to win over viewers when they’re young, executives said, they may be able to secure their loyalty for life.” — Washington Post, 2016

Though outdated, this statement likely still holds true till today, especially with the subscriber base nearly tripling since then. Winning over the kids’ loyalty at a young impressionable age reaps retention in the long term, which is key to their subscription model.

Parents are an equally important target audience in this case, since they’re essentially the ones paying for and controlling the access for their kids. Aside from keeping the kids entertained with their constant stream of kids content, Netflix has to keep in mind parental concerns such as security, wellbeing when designing their product experience.

Product Timeline of Netflix (Kids)

Over the past decade, Netflix has come up with a some product improvements that caters to their parental and kids experience. To point out a few key ones:

2011 — “Just for Kids” section

A separate hub of movies and TV shows for under 12s.

(-) Kids could still easily switch to the main adult section with a click of a button.

2013 — Profiles

One account could now hold multiple profiles, and parents could set up a ‘Kids’ profile and restrict content based on maturity settings.

(-) Harder to switch now, but still possible if the kids were savvy enough

2020 — Profile Pins

Ability to set a password lock for each profile

(+) Seems to solve the problem of kids having access to mature content now

A key problem that is apparent Netflix is trying to solve with its feature updates is that of kids being exposed to inappropriate content. For now, that problem seems under control. However, there’re are still other unsolved parental concerns that can be potentially resolved with more product features, which I’ll talk about in the next section.

What Parents Care About

Too much screen time

Parents are a busy bunch — they do not have the luxury of being physically present with their kids 24/7 to monitor their TV usage. At the same time, they definitely do not want their kids to fall into the blackhole of Netflix and mindlessly consume content for hours on end.

“Excessive screen time may inhibit a child’s ability to observe and experience the typical everyday activities they need to engage with in order to learn about the world, leading to a kind of “tunnel vision,” which can be detrimental to overall development.” — Health Matters

Other negative impacts of excessive screen time

• Delayed sleep — due to the blue light emitted from the screen which inhibits melatonin (the sleep hormone)
• Sedentary behaviour
• Eye health
• Cognitive development

Educational Value

The type of content that kids consume is often a concern for parents as well. There are put simply, ‘good’ shows and ‘bad’ shows, where the former provides educational value to the viewer (eg. nature shows, moral value shows), while the latter is purely for entertainment purposes.

Parents might be less willing to let their kid spend a lot of time consuming ‘bad’ shows.

Knowledge of their Kid’s Activities

As mentioned earlier, parents do not have the time to physically monitor their kid’s watch activity 24/7. It’s important for them to know what their kids are up to in their absence, so that they can be aware of the above concerns.

Netflix has a few product solutions to tackle this, such as the ability to track the viewing history of your kid’s profile and a recently launched Kids Activity Report to help parents connect better with kids.

Out of these 4 concerns, I chose to focus on Problem 2: Too much screentime as the key one due to both the lack of product solutions for these as well as the importance weightage among the concerns.

UX Improvement Proposal

Proposed Solution

Allow parents to customise a daily screen time limit for Kids profiles.

1. Profile Page
   Parents are able to have a quick view of how much screen time their kids had today, without having to navigate to the settings to check. This provides convenience and a peace of mind for them in their daily Netflix routine.

2. Entering a Kids Profile
A welcome indicator will appear at the top, stating the watch time limit so that the kids are aware from the beginning. This helps them to plan how to maximise their time within this limited period.

The copy written here is stated in a positive manner — rather than imposing the word “limit” which has a negative connotation, it frames the watch time as a reward/treat instead.

3. While watching a show
When hovering on the screen, an indicator on the left will show the daily screentime countdown left for the Kid profile. I chose to place it as a hover function so that it won’t inhibit the watch experience for the kid and make them feel stressed while watching the show.

4. Time’s up
When the time is up, the screen will automatically display this exit message, with the only button being to ‘Exit Netflix’. Again, the copy tries to frame this in a positive manner, encouraging the kids to spend some quality time with their parents.

Once exiting, the kid will not be able to access their Kid Profile again till the next day, when the limit refreshes.

Footnote

Hope you enjoyed this! If you enjoyed this study or have any feedback, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to email me at jas-tay@hotmail.com

Improving the Netflix Kids Experience for Parents was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Backstory

Growing up, I’ve always leaned towards the more ‘creative’ side of things. I took subjects such as Literature in high school and junior college, majored in Communications in university, and even dabbled in making resin art as a side hobby for awhile. I remember reading close to 7 fiction books a week when I was young — I loved reading so much and wanted to become an author when I grew up.

My first foray into the world of tech was at the age of 21, when I applied for a digital marketing internship at a large insurance firm. There, I witnessed first-hand the agile methodology, was exposed to tools such as Confluence and JIRA, learnt about design thinking etc. I subsequently took up an interest in UI/UX design and came back as a UI/UX intern in the same firm. Big shoutout to my mentor at that time — Adam — he was tough but patient enough to impart his knowledge on UX theories and UI design to me, I learnt a lot under his guidance.

At 23, I graduated and landed my first job as a associate PM. Never even knew what a PM was before that year, let alone making it part of my career path, but life works out in funny ways sometimes! In the short period of time I’ve been working, I’ve had juniors/acquaintances/strangers, also with non-technical backgrounds, reaching out to me to learn more about my experience entering this career route — which gave me the idea to write this piece.

5 Tips

1. Care about the user. Care a lot.

At the root of it all, a PM has to have an inherent interest in bettering the lives of end users (could be customers/businesses/internal staff) through their product. A purpose, in short.

Caring about a user can be broken down into what I call a User Interest Pyramid:

• Level 1 — Knowledge
  The foundational stage is all about knowing who your users are. What’s your user segment and their demographics like? How many users do you have?
• Level 2 — Understanding
  As you move up the pyramid, you dig deeper into the psychographics and behaviour of your users. This helps you to understand them better and form clearer insights to back product decisions.
• Level 3 — Evolvement
  The hardest level of all. Users are ever-changing with times and external factors, and it’s important to be attuned with that for your product to stay relevant. This requires you to care consciously and constantly, instead of just making a one-off analysis. How have your users evolved over time, and can you foresee potential change in the future?

Technical knowledge can be learnt, but intention cannot. I place a lot of emphasis on caring for the user because it’s key for coming up with good product decisions and hence good products. If you find the above boring, then the route of being a PM might not be the most suited for you. But if it’s aligned with your interests, do read on for more focused tips.

2. Try out a basic technical project like building a website

The fastest way to learn something is to actually do it. As a PM, you don’t need to code, but it’s definitely helpful to have basic tech knowledge for efficiency and communication purposes with your developers.

Creating a website is one of the basic technical projects you can attempt, and there’s an abundance of tools out there to help you.

Some basic website maker sites I recommend:

• Wordpress
• Squarespace
• Wix

Or if you want to take it a tad further and code the page from scratch:

• Codecademy’s website building course
• Try building a static web page with Jekyll

(Feel free to comment other resources too!)

I’ve got to be real honest though, bulk of my learning was actually done on the job by reading up technical documentations and communicating with my developers who patiently explained things to me when needed.

But demonstrating that you’ve put in effort to hone up your technical knowledge is definitely useful to help you pass the first hurdle — the job interview.

3. Read up on UX theories and experiment with UI design

The other huge pie of knowledge that you have to know as a PM is related to UI/UX design. While Tip 1 — Caring about the User — helps you arrive at a product decision, Tip 3 turns that decision into a visible prototype by applying sound understanding of user interaction with the product and ease of usage.

Similar to knowing how to code, knowing how to design is not necessary but you need to know how to recognise good design.

• Laws of UX: my favourite website for reading up on UX theories
• Sketch / Figma: most popular interface design softwares
• Dribbble / Behance: for design inspiration

If you are unsure where to begin, again just dive right into it and learn along the way. Take part in the daily UI challenge where new exercises will be sent to your email everyday. Once you’re done, you can reference others’ works to see how they went about the same exercise and learn from them.

Medium has lots of great design thought articles as well, I particularly like to read UX case studies to see how the authors break down their thought process behind a design decision.

4. Be comfortable with reading and analysing data

Not all companies have the luxury of having a separate data analysis team to deliver insights to the PM. Most of the time, PMs themselves have to deal with all spectrums of data:

• understanding the raw data structure,
• knowing how to query from a database,
• analysing data and pulling insights.

This requires a mix of business (knowing what metrics the company cares about) and technical knowledge (knowing how to work the data). For the latter, I recommend learning basic SQL.

5. Stay up to date on product trends and question the decisions behind them

The latest product design that’s become the talk of the town is Instagram’s decision to replace the notification tab with the shop tab.

From the way I see it, this seems to be a business driven decision to push shopping behaviour among Instagram users, making use of one of the most commonly clicked tab positions in-app. The bottom navigation bar is historically used for the app’s most important features, due to the ease of reach and sticky position.

While shifting the notifications entry point to the top right position together with chat might make sense logically since both are social features, I think Instagram could have better taken into account Level 3 of the User Interest Pyramid — Evolvement. Users are used to clicking on the original notifications tab position and feeling a sense of acknowledgement from seeing the social activity; they now have to readapt to the new feeling and content they get from the same user journey. Not the most ideal for the user, but I get the importance from the business standpoint.

So that’s a snippet of what I think of Instagram’s latest feature change, you can apply such thinking to any product out there really and try to decode the decision behind it. There will always be multiple viewpoints but what’s most important is the sense-making of it that demonstrates your ability to think on a deeper level.

All in all, knowing and doing any of these will already be a great talking point between you and your interviewer. If you like me come from a non-technical background, take advantage of other strengths you might have such as UI/UX experience while brushing up on other areas you lack in. I hope that these tips will come in handy for you!

5 Tips for Entering the World of Product Management With a Non-Technical Background was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So begins an embarkation on my first ever UX case study evaluation. Having read multiple Medium articles on this topic, I was itching to give this whole process a go. E-commerce apps are not exactly the easiest to evaluate and re-design given their navigation complexities, but I chose Shopee as my case study of choice because I wanted to give myself a challenge.

In this case study, I will be focusing on Shopee’s mobile application instead of the portal.

*Note: I was not affiliated with Shopee at the point of publication and this redesign was done on my own accord.

About Shopee

Shopee is one the leading eCommerce platforms in Southeast Asia. It has a wide selection of product categories ranging from consumer electronics to home & living, health & beauty, baby & toys, fashion and fitness equipment. It also has an in-app chat function that allows buyers to chat with sellers, as well as a rewards section that allows users to redeem Shopee Coins and exchange them for vouchers.

This case study will analyse in detail and aim to improve the user experience that Shopee buyers have when using the app.

The Design Process

After researching on numerous design thinking processes, I decided to base my process on the ‘Double Diamond’ model, mainly for the reason that it includes the first phase of ‘Discover’, which is a broad categorisation that allows more room for research compared to other design processes which start with ‘Empathise’, which is limited to user-related research.

Below are the methodologies included in each phase of my design process:

Discover

• Main competitors
• Heuristic evaluation
• User research
• Usability testing

Define

• Affinity mapping
• Personas
• Journey mappings
• Problem statements
• 2x2 prioritisation matrix

Develop

• Ideation
• Wireframe design
• Prototype design

Deliver

• Interactive prototype
• Visual mockup
• Medium article

Main Competitors

Here’s a comparison of iOS/iPad AppStore and Google Play rankings across apps in the shopping category, using App Annie.

Looking at the average rankings across the app stores, Shopee places 3rd, with Lazada and AliExpress taking the 1st and 2nd place respectively. The latter two will be taken as the main apps for comparisons against Shopee and referred to for good use case examples. Coincidentally, their app colour is all the same — orange! Confusing much…

Heuristic Evaluation

Using Jakob Nielsen’s 10 principles for interaction design as a guide, I analysed the current Shopee app screens to identify key issues and areas for improvement. Below is my slide deck of the screenshots and pointers.

User Research

I interviewed 4 users of the Shopee app to find out what they thought about it. These users consisted of a mix of both frequent users and users who seldom use the app to balance out the findings.

Key Findings

• 4/4 use the app with an intention to find a particular product already in place, hence they will immediately go to the search function rather than scrolling through the categories on the app
• All of them use the app to buy totally different products (games, arts and craft products, a monitor, and skincare)
• 1/4 users constantly uses the rewards program in the app that allows users to earn coins
• 2/4 mentioned that they usually buy the products on the Shopee website, and use the app to track their products on the go. Hence, the tracking feature on the app was of importance to them. In fact, that was why one of them downloaded the app in the first place.
• With regards to user friendliness and product categorisation, various recommendations were brought up including: 1. Expand on product description 2. Make shipping time clearer 3. Expand on its categories and sub-categories available 4. Explain what the mall tab is about 5. Reduce number of tabs 6. Reduce clutter
• 4/4 of them do not leave reviews after purchasing a product. However, all of them placed a great importance on reading reviews in deciding whether or not to purchase a product.

Apart from interviewing these users, I also went to the app-store to see what other users had to say about the app. Below are some screenshots of relevant comments:

While a lot of the comments were praises about the app, there were a few gripes here and there mainly related to the authenticity of sellers and products and the poor organisation of the app. This was similar to some of the user interviews as well.

Usability Testing

After interviewing the users, I gave 2 tasks for them to carry out, which I screen-recorded for further analysis.

Buy a moisturiser using the search function on the app

• Generally, the users didn’t have any trouble with this task
• The filter options were not utilised after they searched for the moisturiser
• All of them looked at product reviews in considering whether they should buy the product. In particular, product reviews with photos was what they commonly clicked to look at.

Buy a moisturiser by going through the categories on the app

• 1/4 users went to the ‘Mall’ tab and clicked on the ‘Beauty and Personal Care’ category to look for the moisturiser. However, there was no further filtering options for her to narrow down her search to just moisturisers. This was unlike the same category from the home tab, where there would a be a filtering option on the top right of the screen.
• The other 3 users searched from the home tab. One user really struggled to find the categories section in the home tab as he didn’t know he had to scroll down all the way. He also scrolled past the categories on the first try, not realising they were categories.
• The other user accessed Shopee Mall from its section on the home tab to enter a skincare store, and bought the moisturiser from there.
• The 2 users who bought from Shopee Mall were the more experienced ones who knew that the mall included products from top sellers and official shops. The other 2 did not know what the ‘Mall’ tab was about.

Personas and Journey Mapping

Based on the key findings and research on the app, I created 3 personas depicting the user’s behaviour, sentiment and pain-points throughout their stages of using the app.

From there, we created problem statements for each of these personas:

Persona 1 (Steffi Low): Steffi needs more product reviews in the product listings so that she can be sure her money is spent rightfully. She also wants the Shopee Mall categories to show sub categories as well so that she can further narrow her search better.

Persona 2 (Rachel Tay): Rachel needs a less cluttered interface and more obvious filter options in the Shopee Mall section of the app so that she will be more inspired to browse and discover more products beyond her usual buy.

Persona 3 (Adrian Low): Adrian needs the app features to be less confusing. He wishes there were more explanations about different sections of the app such as ‘Feed’ and ‘Mall’ beyond the on-boarding screen that he didn’t read.

2x2 prioritisation matrix

Next, I prioritised the features according to what was important to both the user and the business.

In the real world, the business probably doesn’t have time to work on every single pain-point, hence the prioritisation here. More important points can be addressed in earlier design sprints, and the rest subsequently. However, I will still touch on most of these points in my prototype.

Ideation, Wireframe, Prototype

“Brand guidelines such as the colour of the banner, and categories such as home owning — all this dictates the type of seller or buyer we want to attract to the app. We want to attract the mature, resourceful and trustworthy user,” said Chris Feng, CEO of Shopee.

Keeping in mind to keep in constant the brand colours and stick to the same main categories, I came up with a wireframe and prototype of the new design I had in mind.

A Closer Look

1. Home Tab

What changed?

• Categories shifted up to become a sticky header at the top of the page, so that users will be able to access it even after scrolling past the main screen
• Banner shifted down so that the colour of the banner will no longer be a hindrance to whether users can see the icons
• Inclusion of ‘My Orders’, ‘My Favourites’, and ‘My Feed’ into quick links, based on user interview feedback
• Reduction of sections to reduce clutter

2. Replacing ‘Feed’ with ‘Rewards’ on the main tab

< This is the original rewards page on the left.

Singaporeans love free stuff.. which was why I replaced feed on the main tab with a USP of Shopee that I felt was more compelling to users to keep returning to the app — the rewards! Not to say feed isn’t important as well, it’s placed as a quick link on the home tab in the redesign.

The current way to access Shopee Coins is through a link in the account tab (see in interactive mockup), which was not prominent at all. This was probably also why only 1/4 of the users I interviewed knew about the existence of such a section on the app.

3. Shopee Mall

Now for those of you who don’t know what’s Shopee Mall, it’s a section of the app which features official brands and top sellers. The original design didn’t really convey that message except for the bar which highlights the 100% authenticity, which didn’t really register in the user’s heads during the user interviews. Most of them felt like it was just a repeated portion of the home page.

What changed?

• A pop-up explaining Shopee Mall so that users could understand it more. ‘Dismiss Forever’ also included as an option so it won’t be annoying
• Colour block added to give the ‘feel’ of entering the mall (visualise the two blocks animated to open like a door). This is to differentiate from the home page
• Shops and products separated to provide clearer focus with user intention
• Subcategories added and filter options placed nearer to product to improve visibility

3. Shopping Cart

Again, I replaced one of the main tabs — this time changing out notifications for shopping cart. The cart function is important both to the business and buyer, it’s the screen before purchase, and a place that consolidates all the items that the user is potentially interested to purchase. The original position at the top right corner makes it a little harder for users to stretch their thumbs to reach, thus the rearrangement to the bottom tab for a better user experience.

What changed?

• Function to tick shop name and have all items ticked removed. It’s confusing and adds to the clutter.
• Enter code and select vouchers separated

4. Encouraging feedback after purchase

As annoying as popups are, gathering reviews are essential to gaining the customer’s trust in the product.

Aside from that, one other idea I thought of was to incorporate reviews into the rewards system eg. Leave a review to earn xx number of coins

While there are more screens I’ve designed, I shall cut the talk and end here with an interactive prototype that you guys can play around with. If you’ve read till here, I thank you for keeping your attention. 👊🏻

Footnote

Hope you enjoyed this! If you enjoyed this case study or have any feedback for me, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to email me at jas-tay@hotmail.com ☺️

A UX case study on Shopee (and my redesign of it) was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.