Team
Global Monetization Design Team
my Role
Product Design
Tools
Figma
Claude Code / AI Tooling
Duration
3 months
overview
Designing new mobile features for TikTok Promote and Business Accounts
Promote is TikTok's mobile advertising tool. It's an unusual (and fun!) product to design for: desktop SaaS problems like payments and data dashboards, packaged as a simple consumer mobile flow. Over three months I shipped work across Promote and Business Accounts, mostly on surfaces where user intent and business intent are somewhat contradictory.
projects
Some projects I worked on during my 3-month internship
Animating UI in code instead of a timeline
I built these marketing animations out of Figma SVGs and static keyframe screens, animating them in code with Claude. I set it up with live sliders for the timing values, an idea I took from Josh Puckett's Dialkit, so I could tune the motion in real time with instant feedback. From there, I used the Lottie Creator MCP to convert AI-generated JSON instructions into actual Lottie files, so I could ship them to my developer.
Redesigning a web checkout that users didn't trust
App Store fees are added to in-app purchases, so promotion orders cost more when paid in the app. Paying on TikTok.com avoids the fee, so the product prompts users to link out. But many users abandoned the checkout screen, because the handoff and landing page felt untrustworthy. I designed the checkout screen on TikTok.com to address that drop-off, worth roughly $1.8M/month in unrealized revenue.
Designing an AI agent flow for refunds and withdrawals
Promi is Promote's AI agent. I led the design of its refund and withdrawal query flow from scratch. Refunds are the product's biggest support category, 22 to 24% of all tickets. Much of the work was deciding which parts of the flow should be controlled with UI and buttons, instead of the chatbot.
After two major rounds of iteration, we cut the initial proposed feature set from 18 abilities to 6.
Building components for an AI design system
The refund and withdrawal flow needed patterns that didn't exist yet, so I built them into Promote's AI design system: multi-creative variants, card components, and documentation for both.
Prompting advertisers to spend again, without overpromising
I designed reengagement entry points that prompt advertisers to add budget or re-promote based on how their campaign is performing. Projected at 3 to 5% incremental revenue and a 2% ARPA lift per order.
Most of the design work went into what performance data to surface and when. Show only past performance and there's little reason to spend further; show too much forward projection and the product is overpromising.
Helping 54M accounts verify their business identity
I was the product design point of contact for business account verification, a compliance project affecting 54M accounts.
Compliance messaging defaults to telling people what they have to do. I worked with a content designer to lead with what verification gets a business instead, then fit that into notification surfaces that had very little room for the string lengths we needed.
Happy to walk through the design process in a call.
Please reach me at tlux10@pratt.edu or via my LinkedIn if you'd like to learn more.
reflection
What I learned: Designing for the user means weighing the business too
School teaches you to design for the user, and that framing holds up when you're explaining a decision, too. But it doesn't tell you much about the funnel, or what the business needs from the same screen.
For example, on the verification project, my first instinct was to give people an easy way out early on. I assumed a lot of them were personal accounts that had upgraded by mistake. But the goal was to preserve as many business accounts as possible, so the downgrade exit needed to come later, after someone had a real chance to get through the flow.
memories
Three months in the Bay
