Where Design Meets Real Life: Bingyi Liu and Peixiaoyu Yu on Building for Caregivers, Scattered Minds, and the People Between the Pixels

Every year in the world of design recognition, there are two moments that matter most to working UX teams: the new season, when competitions reopen and standards are restated in public, and the catch-up window, when last year's strongest work is revisited as a benchmark for what the industry should reward next. As of March 2026, both moments are in motion. Red Dot's Brands & Communication Design program continues its 2026 cycle with April as the end of regular registration, and the Creative Communication Award (C2A) has confirmed that its 2026 edition is open for entries.

Against this backdrop, two UX/product designers, Bingyi Liu and Peixiaoyu Yu, are being profiled for a pair of collaborative projects that have each received juried recognition in UX/UI design, and that together tell a quiet story about what it means to design for real human constraints.

The first is TinyPrep, recognized in Red Dot's Brands & Communication Design competition under the "Mobile User Interface Design" category, a discipline that sits squarely within Red Dot's "Interface & User Experience Design" taxonomy. Red Dot's competition, internationally recognized since 1993, evaluates entries through a multi-day process in which an independent jury of 30 international experts examines each submission individually, judging on criteria framed as Idea, Form, and Impact, where Impact explicitly encompasses both comprehensibility and emotionality.

TinyPrep lives exactly where those two forces collide. Born from a simple wish to make mealtimes easier, healthier, and more joyful for families with special-care kids, the app serves caregivers of children with diabetes, autism, or food allergies, many of whom navigate tight budgets every day. Its UX outcomes are deeply practical: personalized meal plans built from everyday ingredients (including EBT-eligible items or those accessible through local food banks), smart shopping lists, easy recipes, and kid-friendly nutrition facts, all designed to reduce the mental load on a caregiver who needs "right now" clarity under stress, not just a pretty interface. TinyPrep has also earned a Silver at the NY Product Design Awards, Gold and Silver at the Muse Design Awards, a Silver at the Titan Innovation Award, and a Silver at the London Design Awards, a breadth of recognition that reflects the project's resonance across multiple design evaluation frameworks.

The second project is Pebble, named a C2A Winner 2025 in "User Experience Design / UI & UX Design," with Bingyi Liu and Peixiaoyu Yu as lead designers. C2A, created by the Farmani Group as a sister initiative of the IDA International Design Awards, is an international awards program where creative solutions are selected by a renowned international jury of creative-industry professionals. Its 7th annual edition drew submissions from 27 countries across 22 categories, with judging criteria that emphasize design excellence, creativity and originality, impact and utility, and emotional significance. Pebble has additionally been recognized by the European Product Design Award.

Pebble was conceived as a response to an AI-driven world where minds scatter across tools and conversations, leaving fragmented thoughts that are hard to reconnect. The project explicitly addresses ADHD as a compounding challenge: ideas leap quickly from topic to topic and often slip away. Pebble positions itself as a gentle space where scattered sparks reunite, forming a playful canvas where every idea belongs.

What connects TinyPrep and Pebble is not simply that both earned juried recognition, but that both began from the same place: a refusal to design around an idealized user. One project serves a parent calculating carbohydrates at midnight; the other serves a mind that moves too fast for its own filing system. Both treat friction not as a design flaw to be polished away, but as a human reality to be met with care.

In both collaborations, the two designers brought complementary instincts to the table. Yu led empathy work and problem framing, mapping constraints, emotional tone, and what "success" feels like for the person at the other end of the screen. Liu led interaction architecture and usability clarity, turning complex requirements into guided, low-friction flows where nothing feels like a chore. For TinyPrep, that meant translating tangled nutrition constraints into something a tired parent could navigate in minutes. For Pebble, it meant designing interaction patterns for capture, resurfacing, and gentle reconnection, while Yu shaped the micro-moments that make returning feel safe and motivating. A "gentle space" requires both system reliability and psychological safety, working in concert.

Bingyi Liu grew up in a small city in northeastern China, surrounded from childhood by her mother's dental clinic, a place where she learned early to observe, listen, and care about the people in front of her. That instinct for understanding people carried her across the Pacific to Michigan State University, where she earned dual degrees in Nutritional Science and Media & Information, and then to the University of Michigan, where she completed her M.S. in Information with a focus on User Experience and Human-Computer Interaction. Her professional path has taken her through complex product ecosystems at Aptiv, where she served as the sole UX designer for the Autonomous and Connected Services division, leading end-to-end design across fleet management platforms and building design systems from the ground up. More recently, she has been designing digital training tools for gene therapy medical devices at Eli Lilly, work where a single unclear interaction could have clinical consequences, and where the stakes of "good enough" design are measured in patient outcomes. Liu has also earned a Red Dot Design Concept Award, a UX Design Award, and an ADC Award for Hear Me, an AI-based assistant for people with hearing and speech disabilities. She has served as a jury member for the UCLA Designathon 2025, the UbiComp workshop, the ORPETRON Design Award, and the NY Design Award, evaluating design work with the same rigor that has defined her own practice.

Peixiaoyu Yu grew up in a northern Chinese city where social services existed but rarely reached the contours of individual need, an observation that stayed with her and eventually shaped her design philosophy. She came to the United States to study at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, earning her M.A. in Web Design & New Media with a UX focus, having earlier completed a B.A. in Information Management at Zhengzhou University. Her father's professional connections to organizations working with UNICEF quietly deepened her sensitivity to children's welfare and social equity, themes that would later surface in TinyPrep. Yu entered the industry through the B2B world at Loft Labs, where she became the company's sole designer and built everything from scratch: the first product website, the brand identity, the design system, conference booth experiences for KubeCon, and eventually the full product UI redesign in collaboration with engineering. That experience of owning the entire design chain, from pixel to print to stage, gave her a rare fluency across product, brand, and marketing design. But the pull toward designing for real people in vulnerable situations never left. TinyPrep was, in many ways, a homecoming: a chance to apply everything she had learned in high-velocity startup environments to a problem that mattered on a deeply human level.

Bingyi Liu: "Across TinyPrep and Pebble, we started from real human constraints, time, stress, and attention, and designed flows that reduce friction without flattening the person behind the screen."

Peixiaoyu Yu: "For me, award-worthy design is design that keeps showing up for people in everyday moments, whether that's a parent planning meals for a child with special needs, or someone trying to hold onto an idea long enough to let it grow."

As Red Dot's 2025 Brands & Communication Design exhibition moved from Berlin through January 2026 and into a special exhibition phase at the Red Dot Design Museum Essen beginning in February, juried recognition becomes an accessible archive for the field. With Red Dot's 2026 cycle underway and C2A's 2026 edition open for entries, TinyPrep and Pebble offer a timely case study in what top-tier UX collaboration looks like: research-led, constraint-aware, and built, always, for human outcomes.