How it started
When I joined the project, the Visavis team had just finished their first iteration on their MVP. The backend was coming together and plans were in place for building out the front end. However, the UI needed help.
As a freelance designer, I worked directly with the founder/CEO and a small team of developers to buildout the UI and styleguide for the customer facing parts of the app.
I also had a chance to collaborate with Will Le, the best UX intern ever, when applying the visual design guidelines to hundreds of mobile screens.
Trying Stuff Out / Anything goes
Because the mobile app and the company alike were at such an early stage of development, I had the opportunity to go a little crazy with my UI explorations. Here are some of the early UI explorations based on all the fun ideas the team had:
The Need for a Design System
While the project didn't initially call for development of a design system, I decided that the team would benefit significantly from having a library of reusable components.
Past experience with design systems taught me that creating one from scratch is extremely labor intensive and way too time consuming for the project timeline the Visavis team had in mind.
I created a mini design system for the team that codified and standardized commonly used UI components like button states and styles, card elevations, spacing between elements, etc. I used the google material design system as a base and reskinned it to match Visavis brand guidelines.
We created custom icons instead of pulling from the existing google icon library to ensure our app maintained a unique yet familiar look and feel.
(not the actual design system)
Where we ended up
We settled on a simple UI to highlight content and support the different kinds of imagery users might see depending on which brands or people they follow.
We opted for bold headers and a different font style to differentiate the app from the the social media and meetup apps that we drew inspiration from.
By early fall 2023, the Visavis mobile app officially launched on the app store.
Some Bad news
Like many small, pre-seed startups, Visavis ultimately closed up shop. The app is no longer available on the app store.
Thanks to the amazing team that made this project such a joy to work on despite our short time together!
