Solving high-impact product problems for an early-stage social app

Product Strategy · UX Research · UX/UI Design · Mobile Product Design

BACKGROUND

Zate began as an Austin, TX-based dating app where you post what you want to do — a Zate — and see who is interested in joining you. The idea was formed in 2020 at the height of the pandemic when people were hungry for connection — to get out and enjoy fun activities with people. 

I was involved from the earliest stages, helping shape the product vision, conducting user research, and developing early wireframes. Another designer translated that work into the first App Store release.

By the time I took a leadership role, the product had been live for 18 months and had thousands of downloads, but was experiencing issues with user retention.

I led a redesign to improve both the visual experience and the UX across the app, while responding to user feedback to broaden Zate’s scope to help people find friends, discover events, and purchase tickets.

REDESIGN TEAM

Founder

Developer

Me (Designer, Product Strategist)

REDESIGN TIMELINE

12 Months

MY ROLE

  • Led the UX/UI redesign

  • Designed new product features

  • Continued user research and testing

  • Collaborated directly with development

  • Designed the Zate website

  • Contributed to product and marketing strategy

  • Partnered closely with the founder on product direction

WHAT WAS ALREADY WORKING

Zate was already accomplishing several of its core goals through the Create page: helping users discover places and activities while supporting local businesses and creators.

Curated Zate ideas
Local influencers and people in the know curated categories of places and activities that users could turn into Zates.

This became one of the strongest parts of the product: 80% of Zates created came from curated ideas rather than custom Zates.

Driving downloads
Working with influencers served two purposes: it gave users a steady supply of unique Zate ideas and created a built-in marketing channel. When curators shared their categories with their own audiences, those posts also drove downloads. 

PROBLEM

People were excited about the idea of Zate, but that wasn’t translating into engagement with the product.

There was friction throughout the journey from understanding Zate → participating → connecting → actually making a plan and following through on it.

CONSTRAINTS

We had a small team with only one developer.

Every iteration and new feature went through internal testing before moving on to testing events that we organized.

The feedback loop was strong, but we had to carefully prioritize the changes that would have the biggest impact. 

SOLUTION

An experience and visual overhaul to reduce friction, clarify key flows, and make the app feel as exciting as the idea behind it.

New features that broadened Zate beyond dating and supported a wider range of user goals.

STRATEGY

We prioritized improvements around the user journey, focusing first on the moments with the greatest impact.

OUTCOMES

  • Shipped a full product redesign

  • Expanded Zate beyond dating with “As Friends”

  • Created new features:

    • “Message First”

    • Ability to buy tickets to events

  • Organized activations to drive downloads

  • Zate creation increased 400%

PROBLEM 01

Users completed onboarding — but weren’t always creating Zates.

For users’ profiles to be visible they needed to create a Zate.

So, although they successfully entered the app, they really hadn’t entered the experience. 

SOLUTION

I redesigned onboarding to guide users to create their first Zate. 

This transformed onboarding from account setup into product education. 

The principle was: Don't just explain the experience. Let users experience it.

ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY

While adding this new step, I also recognized that the existing onboarding flow had become cluttered over time.

I simplified the sequence and removed unnecessary steps, making onboarding shorter, clearer, and easier to move through.

PROBLEM 02

The product didn't feel as exciting as the idea.

Users were excited by the concept, but inconsistent patterns, unnecessary friction, and a UI that often competed with the content made the experience feel less intuitive and engaging than it could be.

The opportunity was to make Zate feel as simple, social, and
experience-driven as the concept behind it.

SOLUTION

Improve the UX/UI, and make people and activities the focal point.

I simplified flows across the experience, removed unnecessary steps, strengthened information hierarchy, and created more consistent interaction patterns.

By removing unnecessary background colors, shifting buttons to a more neutral greyscale palette, and introducing more photography throughout the app, the interface became quieter and gave the content more room to lead.

The excitement factor from the very beginning

The sign-in page required fewer structural changes, so I focused mostly on the first impression. I replaced the static gradient background with a video of people enjoying fun activities together, giving people a sense of what Zate was about before they even entered the app.

BEFORE

AFTER

Building a stronger profile system

The Profile section is one of the areas that I built the most components for. I also added icons and refined the language used in quick stat questions.

Some examples from the Profile Component Library

Improving the crux of the experience

The Discover redesign was one of the areas I was most excited to tackle because I believed it could have the greatest impact on the user experience and how Zate felt to use. I also designed ahead for upcoming features—including friendship, ticketing, and messaging—so the experience could evolve without becoming increasingly complex.

Making experiences the focus

The Create a Zate flow offered one of the clearest opportunities to reduce visual noise and let photography lead. For curated Zates like this one, imagery of the specific place became the focal point throughout the flow, helping users stay connected to the experience they were creating.

Hierarchy audit and redesign

The Review Your Zate page needed a little bit of everything — toned down colors, the person and experience as the focal point, more intuitive buttons, and component changes carried over — but it especially needed improved information hierarchy. I also added auto layout to make future changes and mockups easier to manage.

PROBLEM 03

Users wanted to use Zate to meet friends, but the current structure only supported dating. 

Research and feedback showed that limiting the product to dating excluded a large portion of prospective users.

INTERNAL DEBATE

We debated the best way to make friendship available within Discover.

I advocated for a toggle between friends and dates so users could clearly switch between what they were looking for from moment to moment.

This approach could have shortened onboarding, removed the need to navigate through Settings → Preferences to change intent, and simplified some of the logic our developer needed to support. I also believed it would reduce cognitive load by making the user’s current mode explicit.

The counterargument was that separate Discover feeds could reduce the amount of content visible in each.

We didn’t have time to A/B test the two approaches. Although I disagreed, we ultimately went with a single Discover feed, using icons on each Zate card to indicate whether the intent was platonic or romantic.

SOLUTION

We introduced the “As Friends” feature. 

Since the product was already built around experiences rather than profiles alone, it made sense to expand its scope to offer opportunities for connections beyond just dating. 

Onboarding + As Friends flow

This flow represents a user who is looking for both friends and dates. Because both preferences were selected they needed to specify whether the Zate they were posting was for friends or dates. 

Setting preferences / Posting a Zate

Here are the key screens that changed with the “As Friends” addition. 

Viewing “As Friends” in Discover 

The icon signifying the intent for friendship was visible in both the discover feed and in the expanded Zate view. 

WHAT I LEARNED

I took a valuable lesson from the disagreement over the “As Friends” format. It taught me that my job as a designer wasn't simply to advocate for my preferred solution. It was to make the tradeoffs visible enough for the team to make an informed decision. 

PROBLEM 04

Connections weren’t always turning into plans.

Zate made it easy to say, “I’d like to do this.”
But even when a connection led to a conversation, the interaction often stalled before becoming a real-world plan.

That undermined one of the product’s core goals:
getting people out into the world, connecting over places and activities.

SOLUTION

We introduced event discovery and ticket purchasing within the Zate experience. 

The hypothesis was that increasing commitment around the activity itself could help transform:

“We should do this.” → “We’re doing this.”

MONETIZATION STRATEGY

Ticketing wasn’t just intended to make plans more actionable—it was also central to Zate’s
monetization strategy.

The broader product vision was to connect users with real-world experiences and capture value when that interest turned into a transaction. Activations helped us test demand and drive acquisition, while in-app ticket sales and the planned Ticketmaster integration created a path toward revenue without relying solely on advertising or subscriptions.

That made ticketing important on two levels: it reduced friction for users while creating a business model around the behavior we were trying to encourage.

Implementation strategy

We planned to introduce ticketing in phases:

Discovering the activation on Instagram → redeeming at the event

Prototype of a live activation

This particular activation drove 112 downloads. I was at the venue watching people use the app, which gave me the opportunity to gather feedback in real time. Combined with onboarding changes that encouraged users to create Zates, activations like this helped drive a 400% increase in Zate creation.

PROBLEM 05

Conversation was too restricted.

Only the Zate creator could initiate the first message — and often, that didn’t happen. 

Interested users had no way to express themselves beyond tapping Interested and hoping the creator reached out.

SOLUTION

We introduced Message First, allowing interested users to initiate a conversation and show more of their personality to the Zate creator.

The hypothesis was that less restriction would take some pressure off the Zate creator, leading to increased engagement
between users and across the entire product. 

Breaking the ice with the first message

A user discovers a Zate they’re interested in and can send the creator a message directly from Discover or within Zate Details. 

Receiving the message

The Zate creator received an incoming message through a dedicated callout within “People interested in your Zate.” From there, they could open the message, view it in the context of the Zate, and choose whether to respond.

Reflections

Zate was the first product I was part of from the very beginning, with a hand in strategy, design, marketing, and product development. 

I learned a lot, made mistakes, changed my mind, and became a stronger designer because of it. These lessons stood out above the rest:

A LESSON IN SCALABILITY

Unlike other dating apps, which depend primarily on having enough users in the same area, Zate also depended on having meaningful local content through curated categories.

In a city like Austin, that model worked well, but scaling the same experience to every city—and especially to smaller towns—would have ranged from difficult to impossible. It would have required identifying local curators, vetting them, collecting recommendations, maintaining those relationships, and continuously updating content.

This affected more than content availability—it meant Zate couldn’t simply launch wherever users existed. Each new market also needed enough local content to make a core part of the product function, creating the risk of an inconsistent experience as the product expanded.

The lesson for me was that: 

Scalability isn’t only about whether a team can support growth. It’s also about whether the product can deliver its core experience consistently as it expands.

WHEN THE BEHAVIOR CHANGES THE HYPOTHESIS

In our early research, people repeatedly told us they enjoyed meeting others through shared interests and activities, or wanted to find people to share experiences with. 

When the app launched, the concept generated enthusiasm. But over time, I learned that enthusiasm for an idea doesn’t necessarily translate into sustained behavior.

As we watched people use the product, it became increasingly clear that many users were hesitant to put themselves out there and commit to an activity with someone they didn’t know yet. 

What sounded exciting in theory could feel vulnerable in practice.

The behavior users seemed more comfortable with was almost the reverse of our original premise: build some level of connection first, then make plans once there was comfort, trust, or mutual attraction.

A compelling concept can address a problem people genuinely recognize and still ask them to behave in a way they aren’t naturally inclined to.