How a Top Dribbble Designer Transforms UI/UX: Insights from a Canadian Design Lead

Interview Overview

Li Yi, a Beijing‑born designer now based in Canada, is a top‑10 Dribbble designer in the Canadian region and leads product design at OneClass. He talks about his late start in design, the transition from engineering studies, and the passion that drives his work.

Career Path and Age Concerns

Li explains that overseas employers focus on experience and skills rather than age, and he has collaborated with designers in their 50s who remain active. He advises designers to either deepen expertise vertically or broaden skills horizontally, including learning front‑end code to improve implementation.

Design Philosophy

He emphasizes a holistic approach: from basic UI to user analysis, feature planning, and product positioning. Mastering a complete design workflow makes a designer highly competitive.

Design Landscape Abroad

Li notes that foreign companies prioritize user and product research, data analysis, and competitive studies. Products aim for concise, focused experiences that cater to global users, handling multilingual content and varying text lengths.

Project Case Study: Media Platform Redesign

The project resembles a combination of YouTube and Shopify, allowing creators to sell multimedia content. Key goals were higher user visit frequency, increased traffic for media publishers, easier content discovery, and better platform scalability.

Introduce social features to boost engagement and community interaction.

Implement customizable services for creators and voting mechanisms for users.

Design a flexible layout that adapts to varied content lengths across languages.

During redesign, the team shifted from a traditional grid‑based responsive site to a content‑centric layout, added social interaction, and created package offerings for bundled media.

Design Process and Prototyping

After defining goals, Li’s team performed product and user analysis, identified pain points, and drafted wireframes together with developers to ensure feasibility. They also built a design system covering style guides and component libraries, aiming to reduce development costs and improve consistency.

UI Design Execution

High‑fidelity mockups focused on visual consistency, interaction logic, color contrast, and readability. The new interface offers clearer content hierarchy, better navigation, and promotional space for high‑quality media.

Challenges and Growth

Li acknowledges personal creative blocks and stresses continuous practice on platforms like Dribbble, staying updated on trends, and regularly reviewing past projects for improvement.

Final Thoughts

He encourages designers to keep a beginner’s mindset, focus on ordinary tasks done extraordinarily, and remember that design can change the world by turning inspiration into practical solutions.