Yani Shi’s entry into design builds on initiative and direction shaped through action. She studied business at USC, taught herself design independently, and developed a strong portfolio that secured her place in UC Berkeley’s Master of Design program. That trajectory already suggests something about how she works. Today she is a product designer at Lyft, where she is the sole designer responsible for the airport ride experience, including scheduled airport pickup, ride booking for others, and the XXL ride type for passengers traveling with checked luggage. These are among Lyft’s highest-margin products, collectively contributing millions in revenue on a platform that serves more than 50 million active riders annually. Airport travel remains one of the platform’s most central use cases, with more than half of its users citing it as a primary reason for choosing the service.
PRE-ORDER IN PRINT AND DIGITAL
In parallel, she led the design of Pollen Nav, a navigation application built for allergy sufferers. The project received the 2025 Red Dot Award, New York Product Design Award Silver, European Product Design Award, and the 2026 iF Design Award. Both Red Dot and iF rank among the most respected global design prizes, with the Red Dot alone attracting around 20,000 entries annually from over 70 countries and accepting only a small percentage. Receiving both for the same project places Pollen Nav in a rare position. Her project Ursa, an AI-powered augmented reality system developed to assist astronauts during lunar missions, received the Muse Design Award Gold and Indigo Design Award Gold in 2026. Across these two distinct bodies of work, she has been recognized by five independent international juries.
The origin of Pollen Nav was personal. In 2021, Shi was diagnosed with allergic asthma. She describes lying awake at night, unable to sleep, returning to a single question: what if it were possible to avoid pollen before exposure rather than manage the consequences after. That question became the project’s starting point and reshaped how she approaches design problems.
The first version explored detection through a device capable of identifying airborne pollen in real time. The limitations became clear quickly. Allergic responses vary too widely across individuals for a single device to operate effectively at scale. The second iteration shifted focus to prevention, introducing reminders and medication tracking to support the routines that people with allergies already follow. The final version, developed between 2024 and 2025, expanded the project into a collective platform. Users report their reactions at specific locations, the data aggregates into a real-time network, and the system integrates with Google Maps to generate low-pollen route recommendations. China Daily covered the project in January 2026, identifying Shi as the lead designer and tracing the arc from personal experience to international recognition.
Leading the project required building and aligning a team from scratch. There were no inherited processes and no established norms. Different contributors brought different expectations. Shi created space for open discussion, then translated that input into clear decisions. At the same time, the team developed a design system while building the product. The recognition that followed reflects the completeness of the system, from how users enter it to how they return, and how the community data they contribute increases its value over time.
At Lyft, the design problems differ in context but carry similar demands. The airport remains one of the most complex environments for any mobility platform. A rider under time pressure, navigating a multi-level terminal, must reach the correct pickup point without confusion, yet GPS accuracy indoors remains insufficient to deliver a single reliable answer. Too many options slow the decision, too few create errors. Designing within that tension, at the scale of tens of millions of riders, requires ground-level research. Shi studied airport layouts, categorized pickup structures by scale, analyzed how the product performs across different venue types, and worked with operations, engineering, and business teams to understand the constraints shaping the system.
Ursa follows the same logic, applied to more extreme conditions. Astronauts on lunar missions operate with both hands occupied, maintain continuous situational awareness, and cannot take on additional cognitive load. Any interface friction carries real consequences. Ursa addresses this through voice interaction. The astronaut speaks, the system understands the context of the current task, anticipates the next action, and delivers information exactly where it is needed. Two international gold awards confirm that the system performs under the conditions it was designed for.
What connects these projects is a consistent orientation. Pressure, whether from a personal health condition, the demands of a high-stakes platform, or the constraints of a mission-critical environment, sharpens decision-making when the work is executed well. Shi distinguishes product design from artistic expression with precision. Artists express, product designers solve. The task remains to make decisions that hold under real conditions and to deliver systems that absorb complexity before it reaches the user.
Words by Zarko Davinic.
Originally published in DSCENE “Design Under Pressure” Issue.
