Jiayi Liu

Acorn Aware (Bestie AI)

• Led the redesign of the Relationships feature. The original flat contact list couldn't show how relationships change, so users struggled to tell who to reach out to. Rebuilt it as a relationship system where AI keeps tracking interaction dynamics, using visual distance to express closeness so users can see at a glance which relationships are cooling. Now live.
• Designed the full monetization flow from onboarding to paywall. Partnered with the PM to ship a 4-tier membership subscription, structuring feature tiers and value framing, and balancing product experience against paid conversion in usage-limited moments such as rate-limit prompts.
• Established the brand visual specification and turned it into executable generation and review rules, diagnosing and fixing off-brand drift such as avatars misused as logos. Partnered with growth and engineering to upgrade ad-creative production into a multi-agent generation workflow — three image agents handling conservative variants, new concepts and competitor remakes — supporting campaigns across the US, Japan, Europe and the Middle East, with weekly creative output scaled to around 1,000 images.
• Took the Bestie AI website from design to launch on my own — visuals, interaction, frontend implementation and deployment — built with an AI toolchain (Cursor / v0) with no engineering support, live in 3 days · bestieai.app

Sabbatical Lab

• Defined the visual direction for AI-generated content surfaces and built the foundational design system (color tokens, typography, component states), supporting the core creation flow from generation and editing to export.
• Designed social media and ad content generation templates, strengthening the platform's visual tone and brand consistency.

Cancer Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences

• Led user research and workflow redesign of the hospital's discharge follow-up system; mapped core pain points from interviews with 18 clinicians and 25 patients, improving system efficiency by 35%.
• Designed accessible UI components for elderly users, iterating over 3 rounds on button hierarchy, text legibility and step breakdown.

• Experience design for the Luojiang overseas-Chinese digital living-room platform; contributed the user-experience section of the Future AI Aesthetic Education white paper.

• Experience and interaction design for the official VR exhibition platform of the 20th National Congress; led visual delivery of the website and VR scenes, and designed a virtual character system based on the costume cultures of 52 ethnic groups.

An emotional-support wearable for cancer patients. Owned the interaction experience and companion UI, using emotional feedback to ease anxiety and loneliness during treatment. Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Design Award.

Braille-learning hardware: tactile color modules, three-button navigation, two-handed operation. Owned non-visual interaction design under hardware constraints — making physical feedback and operation sequences work without a visual channel.