Yiqi Yan

Founding Designer @Willow
Prev. @TikTok, @Tencent, @Meta
HCI @Harvard @Tsinghua

Stream, Sports, and Games (Minis) on TikTok

At TikTok, I led design across three content verticals — Streaming, Sports, and Mini Games — shaping how users discover, consume, and return to third-party content inside the app.


Across all three verticals, my work shapes the same four questions:


Discovery — when users encounter third-party content in-feed, do they tap in?

Consumption — once inside, does the experience hold them?

Revisit — do they come back the next day, the next week, the next season?

Creation — can users remix and share what they watched, turning consumption into content that brings more users in?

01 / Stream services

Partnered with major streaming platforms including Netflix and Disney to bring hundreds of licensed series and films onto TikTok, spanning search landing pages, For You Page modules, preview experiences, live streaming, and interactive engagement zones.


The integration delivered impact on three fronts:

  1. it extended session time and watch time by turning passive scrolling into intentional viewing moments;

  2. it expanded TikTok's content ecosystem beyond UGC and unlocked premium advertising inventory against licensed IP; and

  3. it created a differentiated entertainment layer that attracted new user segments and strengthened TikTok's competitive moat in the short-video space. For partners, TikTok became a top-of-funnel discovery channel reaching Gen Z audiences at scale — making it a rare win-win across the streaming ecosystem.

02 / UI Components

These new components I built unlocked differentiated video formats tailored to each traffic entry point, driving measurable lifts in click-through rate, video completion rate, and downstream engagement (likes, comments, shares).


By matching content presentation to user intent at each surface, the components turned incoming traffic into sustained in-app activity rather than one-off visits.

03 / Sports

For the Sports vertical, I built the design and modular system from scratch, leading end-to-end experiences for major live events including the Super Bowl, Olympics, World Cup, MLB, NCAA tournaments, and more. I brought real-time scores, highlight modules, and watch-together features into TikTok's core discovery flow, turning passive conversation around games into active, in-app viewing.


The impact was category-defining: the 2025 Super Bowl experience alone drove 1.8 billion views on event detail pages, proving that TikTok could be more than a place to talk about sports — it could be where fans live the moment. The work extended TikTok's session time during tentpole windows, unlocked premium advertising inventory around marquee events, and positioned TikTok as a credible second-screen destination alongside traditional broadcasters — a meaningful differentiator in the short-video space.

04 / Games

I designed the discovery and revisit surfaces that connect TikTok's feed to its mini-game ecosystem - the entry points in-feed, the Minis Center, and the recently-played shortcuts that bring users back.


The routing surfaces I designed sit on top of TikTok's ~1.99 billion monthly users, with daily actives estimated between 875–954 million. Even single-digit CTR improvements on feed-based game entries translate into millions of incremental first-time players per day.


The metrics I designed toward target at are - acquisition efficiency, Retention, Engagement depth.


The gatekeeping issues I want to solve are:

"Do users tap in when they see a game?"

"Do they come back the next day?"

"Do they explore more than one game?"