Lua Re-design

After releasing the two expansive main features, I finally had the time to focus on creating a new UI for the app. The goal and definition were to reach a bigger audience, so I had to re-design the UI to make it more compelling, yet keeping it a little “mysterious” and Difirinate from our competitors.

This was more about the UI; this was about positioning and creating a product that much more people could relate to.

These were applied through the UI, the content, and the voice and tone we used inside the app. it was also involved in some of the main flows to simplify it and make Lua more relatable.

Problem Statement:
The current design is to “neich” Lua wants to expand and reach a more mainstream audience.

Old chat design

My roles included the following:

Research
- Market analysis + Interviews, and testing prototypes.
We had a dedicated community of users with who we communicated through a Facebook group named connected to love; we would see who were the most engaged ones and then interview them. Another way was to ask for feedback through the app and find our most dedicated users through that flow.

Product vision - Strategic thinking about the changes we are about to make, how to prioritize them, what to remove/add in the flows, and convincing stakeholders that this is the right thing to do, mainly through fun workshops using FIGJAM.

UI/UX - Building the initial style guide in terms of colors, fonts, elements, and everything that will create our new refined look for the app and handing it over to the content writer and the junior designer to complete the flows and prototype. The process took around four months to complete

Management - Managing our road map together with the CTO. Holding release planning meetings and product grooming concerning our quarterly OKRs and KPIs. We used Notion for all our planning and documentation

We ran sprints of two weeks - a month, depending on the size of features and improvements we have on the table (and the number of resources).
We would release it to staging, have the team test it, and show it to a few users to try as well, and only when everything was triple-checked would we release a version to production.

It got very challenging to do when our resources went smaller, forcing me to be creative and even prioritize better.

I released with my team around ten versions, and it felt like we were improving every time, gathering more data, measuring, and creating a better experience time after time.

When I left Lua, we had 30K downloads and 2500 active users.
Our users loved the app; this role gave me so much confidence and expanded my knowledge, and I am grateful to have done it with such a great team and product.