Lark Whiteboard
A deeply integrated online collaborative whiteboard within Lark Docs, delivering visual tools for flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and more.
Role
Product Designer
Duration
2022 - 2023
Type
Lark Docs
Why we pivoted from Ratio to Whiteboard?
$9.8 billion
Valuation
$17.5 billion
$80 million+
2022 Revenue
$160 million+
1065 employees
Team
1831 employees
Domestic design collaborative market
3 million
Market User Scale
User scale of document market
70.12 million
2.6 billion
Collaborative software Market Size
50 billion+
Vastly scalable market
Visual collaboration tools penetrate broader segments than specialized UI design software, unlocking higher-growth potential.
As Lark aims to become fundamental productivity infrastructure, this expansive market scale is essential to justify ambitious long-term vision.
Validated High-ROI Impact
Closing the gap with Figma requires sustained heavy investment — reallocating these resources to mass-market products impacting broader user bases aligns stronger with Lark's strategic priorities, maximizing commercial impact per R&D dollar.
Features I spearheaded
Core feature
Flow
Connection Interactions & Routing Protocols
Text
Text Styling Controls
Stickers
Sticky Note Styling & Typographic Exceptions
Template
Visual styles and interaction patterns for specialized frameworks like Sequence Diagrams and Timeline Maps.
Collaboration and integration
Multi-user Collaboration
Observation Mode Workflow Logic
Native embedding within the Lark productivity suite
Real-time whiteboard data sync and visualization within Lark
Comment
Interactive Commenting on Whiteboards
Meeting Whiteboard
Reimagined whiteboard experiences across conference room displays, PCs, and tablets
AIGC
Designing dialog-driven interactions that scaffold user input of commands and parameters to generate production-grade content across formats.
Flow Tool
In Lark Whiteboard, users can create straight lines, polylines, or curves by either: dragging between points to manually stretch connections, while clicking adjacent objects to auto-connect.
Comment Tool
In Lark Whiteboard, users attach comments directly to objects.
For nested blocks, I engineered drill-down interactions enabling annotations within blocks — empowering users to review documents while commenting on embedded whiteboard objects without context switching.
Stickers and Multi-user Collaboration
Lark Whiteboard enables real-time collaboration with multi-user cursor tracking and interactive sticky notes, empowering teams to conduct virtual brainstorming and content creation.
I engineered content-adaptive font scaling for sticky notes — text size dynamically decreases as content grows, ensuring uniform dimensions across all notes while preserving readability."
AI Generation
As an integral component of the Lark productivity suite, Lark My AI now powers Whiteboard — leveraging large language models to rapidly generate high-quality, multi-format content.
Unlike document-centric scenarios, Whiteboard accommodates diverse toolsets. Thus, our design employs dialog-driven interactions to scaffold user input of parameters and prompts, ensuring precisely targeted outputs.
Meeting Whiteboard
As an integral pre-meeting tool, Lark Whiteboard extends into in-meeting annotation across Rooms systems, PCs, iPads, and Mobile — empowering users to rapidly sketch, annotate, and collaborate during live sessions.
Conclusion
As of Q2 2023
DAU
5.1W
VS Q1: +85.4%
DEU
1.1W
VS Q1: +38.4%
User Edit Retention Rate
59.0%
VS Q1: +7.0%
User Satisfaction
74.5/100
VS Q1: +8.8%
Takeaways
When architecting design tools, we must accommodate diverse user operation habits — thus implementing multiple interaction modes for single functionalities to ensure universal efficacy.
When crafting visual styles and interactions, we must preemptively map technical implementation constraints. For instance, designing curvature controls requires understanding engineers' spline rendering logic — shaping our ideal forms within their mathematical frameworks, rather than chasing unfeasible curves in design tools.
Architecting template content as a core product pillar
More…
