Youtube Gifts
building expressive gifting moments in vertical live
Summer
2025
Designing emotional, expressive gifting for creators + communities
During my internship with the YouTube Live Gifts (Jewels) team, I explored how gifting can create more meaningful, expressive interactions between viewers and creators inside Vertical Lives.
While my main project remains under NDA, I can share two shipped contributions:
- Dog Day, which became the #1 gift in August 2025 and contributed to a 9% revenue uplift across the category
- YouTube’s first AR gifts, where I helped shape early spatial + interaction patterns
These projects focused on balancing emotion, clarity, and playfulness within real-time, high-velocity livestream environments.
Dog Day: A howling husky.
When Dog Day approached, my manager and I had a compressed timeline to design, animate, and ship gifts for the holiday. I created multiple gift concepts, animated them, then navigated approval processes across Engineering, PM, and Program UX teams. The technical coordination was intense—ensuring animations hit performance budgets, getting stakeholder sign-off, managing expectations across teams on tight deadlines.
Real consumers bought and sent these gifts during actual livestreams. One of my Dog Day designs, the Howling Husky, became the #1 gift sent platform-wide within a week, generating 9% of YouTube's August 2025 gifting revenue.
The first ever AR gifts: Bringing objects into the creator’s world.
I contributed to early patterns and UX decisions for YouTube’s first set of AR gifts, exploring how viewers could send objects that appear inside the creator’s real environment during a livestream.
My role focused on defining the interaction constraints, placement logic, and motion patterns.
When another team raised concerns about the design direction, I presented our work at design review with directors, defending our decisions and resolving cross-team alignment issues.
I even went "mini famous" internally—my face was used in all the AR gift mockups, meaning every presentation deck and document featured my face as the creator receiving gifts. This visibility came with responsibility: the designs had to work
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Collaboration
Process & IMPACT
My approach
I worked within a fast-paced multi-disciplinary team, leading weekly meetings with our PM, eng, Program Manager, and UXR and partnering closely with other teams across YouTube.
Every meeting I came prepared with not only work but presentations formatted for cross functional understanding and reference, with goals and check points outlined to keep us all on track.
Impact
Let's just run it back real quick:
Shipped multiple gift sets contributing to YouTube's August 2025 and September 2025 launch.
One Dog Day gift became #1 platform-wide in under a week, driving 9% of monthly gifting revenue.
Successfully presented design work to director-level leadership across product, engineering, and design.
Resolved cross-team conflicts through proactive mock ups to reference during critical conversations.
Contributed to strategic exploration of collaborative gifting that informed YouTube's product roadmap.
Reflecting
This work reinforced my interest in designing for more than just a "user"—moments where peoples collectively shape what happens on screen (or in the world).
I became especially interested in:
- emotional timing
- spatial interactions
- viewer–creator relationships
- expressive systems
- mixed-reality affordances
Gifting sits at the intersection of community, play, generosity, and performance, and working on it fundamentally shifted how I think about interactions inside live platforms.