Leading brand consultant and esteemed author of Designing Brand Identity, Alina Wheeler, is famously quoted as saying “Design is intelligence made visible”. This statement truly captures the multifaceted world of design, which must create synergy between business goals, financial margins, and the overall UX. Lidong Liu is an experienced product designer who has combined the talent of a natural eye with a deep understanding of technology in order to showcase the brilliance of his projects.
The first spark of inspiration
Lidong Liu has always had a passion for music and, at the age of eight, he got his first personal music player – an Apple Shuffle. As he began using the device, he noticed how easily songs could be uploaded and noted the ability for both sequential and random playing order. Although it was fundamentally a simple concept, he was fascinated by the design of this product that took care of its user’s needs by appropriately leveraging modern technology. Not only that, it did so without placing any burden on the user to understand the technology behind its seamless operations. It was then that Liu started to really consider and study the connection between people and technology.
From this spark of inspiration, he began to experiment with own unique creations. During his time in secondary school, Liu designed and produced a few short films and also a handful of websites. Many of his products won recognition and awards at his school, and he was further motivated after seeing the joy and excitement that his creations brought to the broader online community. He had no doubt that this was his path in life and decided to pursue his passion post-secondary, earning his B.E. in Software Engineering from Shanghai’s Tongji University.
Making his mark in the industry before graduation
During his time at Tongji, Liu made some great connections and began playing with business ideas and products. Interestingly, music was once again at the core of his inspiration – this time for an app that he designed and developed with two friends, which would make big waves in China.
Zuiyan was officially launched in 2017. The music mobile app was created to showcase Beijing Opera in a modern and engaging format. Liu initially touched on the concept thanks to his grandmother who, like many others in her generation, loves to watch and perform the art form as a primary source of entertainment. He had spoken with his grandmother about her grief around this dwindling element of her cultural heritage, as she noticed the younger generations were not interested in Beijing Opera. After contemplating what he could do to reinvigorate the interest of his people, Liu decided to use cartoon illustrations, audio clips, and state-of-the-art Augmented Reality techniques to present live Beijing Opera in people’s hands – anytime and anywhere. The app also boasted a highly-engaging feature that allowed users to recreate and retell the stories of this traditional art form, based on their own understanding, to share with others.
Thanks to its unique presentation and innovative techniques, Zuiyan took home the first place prize from the Mobile Application Innovation Contest, beating out over 400 other teams from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. As the competition was organized by the Ministry of Education of China and Apple, the app was then featured on the Apple App Store in 2018 and hit over 20K downloads in just three months. It was such a hit that several major media platforms in China – the likes of China Daily, Tencent, Sohu, etc. – reported about Liu and his app. Noticing the impact of his work, Apple then invited Liu to the 2018 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference for an all-expenses-paid opportunity to showcase his product in front of a notable group of attendees, including Isabel Ge Mahe, Apple’s Vice President and Managing Director of Greater China. The event also led to the mention of Liu as an innovative developer and influencer in the industry in Apple’s China corporate social responsibility (CSR) report. Although he was only on the brink of truly stepping into his career, Liu was already gaining an impressive reputation.
Music is his muse
After graduation, Lidong Liu was fortunate to explore the field with a few design internships, first in China and then in the US. Interning in California with the Arm Treasure Data product, a tool for data engineering and marketing from SoftBank, gave Liu the opportunity to really dive into complex and enterprise-facing design. He worked with Fortune 500 clients and Global 2000 companies like LG, Nintendo, and Warner Bros. Even during the short time that he was with Arm, Liu’s unique design perspectives added significant value to the company and a few months later, the product that he contributed to won the Frost & Sullivan award for Global Customer Data Platform Company of the Year.
Over the next couple of years, Liu’s life saw massive expansion. He was awarded maximum scholarships to complete his Master of Science degree in Human-Computer Interactions at Indiana University. From there, he was elated to circle back around to his passion for music and, in June of 2020, he began working as a product designer for the world-renowned platform, Spotify.
Liu has led several projects with Spotify that have not only improved the UX and added millions of dollars in revenue to the company, but that have also helped artists and labels to profit through the support of their fans and listeners. He has brought his design talents to the user authorization system, helping to ensure its understandability, efficiency and ease of use in different user situations. He led the core design of the customer support platform, which optimizes multiple internal Spotify tools of the listener app with Spotify for Artists, and other components, to provide a better and more consistent system experience.
According to Liu, the most rewarding work he’s done with the company is in particular with Spotify for Artists, as he holds such deep respect for the work of musicians. In this branch of the company, he led the core design of platform capabilities for the paid Marquee ads – a marketing campaign tool for music promotion. He also drove the core design of 2-step verification user onboarding and education, ensuring that the new feature would be well adopted by all Spotify for Artist users, while ensuring the protection of their account security, such as their sensitive music data reports, public profiles, and payment information. Finally, as the current design owner of the overall analytics experience, Liu is optimizing the holistic navigation experience for data consumption and social sharing. The improvements will allow artists and labels to gather more accurate and timely insights based on their tasks and data maturity.
In looking to the future of his work at Spotify, Liu explains: “Helping music creators to succeed has always been my top goal, and I believe improving the music data experience will be my next breakthrough point. The ongoing digital revolution in the music industry brings tremendous opportunities, but it also means that music creators need to collect, consume, and digest more data so that they can better cultivate fandom and generate revenue.”
The reality is that the success of an artist in our modern world requires them to use data to learn what people are listening to and how they’re spending their money in the music industry. When the right information is used in the right way, creators can streamline and uniquely personalize the experiences that they offer their tech savvy music fans. This is exactly why, as the largest music streaming service in the world, Spotify plays such a vital role. It contains, by far, the most first-hand user listening data and is capable of feeding it directly back into the industry.
In reflection on his own position, Liu shares “Standing at the core of this bottom-up loop, I am a designer who can help to democratize music, ensuring the information is presented and interpreted for the good of both the artists and the fans. In such a dynamic work-stream, there is no once-and-for-all solution, but continuous iterations. Leading the holistic data experience design of Spotify for Artists is [a huge project that] I’m thrilled about. I truly believe that it will be my next milestone of bringing digital innovation to the world of music.”
Lidong Liu clearly approaches his design work from a place of deep intelligence. His ability to zoom out, pick up all the dots and details, and then fuze them together into a successful and functional design is unmatched. With Liu, there is no need to sacrifice usability for appearance, or efficiency for cost. He has an incredible talent for manipulating technology to do it all, and for that very reason, the future of this young, yet highly accomplished, product designer is incredibly bright.