Future prototype demo · Shipped screens below ↓

Imagine you want to push yourself — and bring a few friends along.

What if starting that challenge took just one sentence?

Social Media App Redesign

When I joined the team, the previous product designer had already left. I inherited an existing product and its design work in a startup where the team had prioritized rapid shipping over scalability. The experience had accumulated inconsistencies and friction as features were added.

Problem
To grow beyond its early users, Napoz needed a stronger participation loop. But creating a challenge took 10 steps and 5 minutes.
Role
Sole designer · owned Create end to end, from research to shipped flow
Team
Founder + 2 engineers
Timeline
Jan 2024 – May 2025
Outcome
80% less creation time · +47% creation completion rate · +15% in WAU
Key Contribution
Flow redesign; AI-assisted feature; design system rebuilt (Part 02)
Platform
Mobile · React Native
Growth opportunity and user research

Creation feeds the participation loop

Napoz is a social mobile app where anyone can start a group challenge — from a 30-day streak meditation to a friendly burpee contest or a neighbourhood café hunt — invite others to join, and share progress together.

The founder brought an urgent business concern:

“Weekly active users declined 10% in the past month. We need to increase the user engagement rate.”

As the sole product designer, I took ownership of investigating the experience and defining the redesign. To understand where design could support engagement, we looked at the journey that gives people reasons to participate and return.

  1. Create a challenge
  2. Discover & join
  3. Participate & contribute
  4. See progress & others’ activity
  5. Return — back to discover & join, or create your own

Creation supplies the activities that the rest of this loop depends on. That made it an important opportunity to investigate: reducing the effort to publish could give people more opportunities to join and contribute.

The design question became:

How could we help more people turn an idea into a challenge others could join?

People had ideas. Creating them required too much work.

We reviewed product analytics screen by screen, and Create Challenge stood out. The existing flow required 10 steps and an average of five minutes to publish a challenge.

Steps to publish
10
Average creation time
0:00min

I conducted user research, and user interviews reinforced three sources of friction:

  1. Too many setup decisions
  2. One configuration process for different activities
  3. Too much writing and effort to find a cover image

When flexibility became friction. The problem was how much of that flexibility creators had to configure for themselves.

The redesign for challenge creation flow
Move complexity into the system

Two design decisions addressed two kinds of effort

User difficultyDesign responseIntended benefit
Deciding how the challenge should workThree challenge types with relevant settingsFewer unnecessary decisions
Explaining the challenge to othersAI-assisted drafting with a review stepLess effort to turn an idea into publishable content

This gave the redesign a clear relationship to the engagement goal: make creation easier to finish so more ideas could become shared activities.

How to support wildly different challenges in one template?

The old flow exposed settings for leaderboards, points, scoring rules, and other mechanics through the same setup process. I stepped back from the screens and identified three recurring challenge models:

The product could handle different challenge structures while helping creators make decisions relevant to their own idea.

The redesign asks what kind of challenge it is, and the screen answers with only the settings that kind needs.

The old Create Challenge screen — leaderboard setup, points column title, three scoring modes, advanced point rules, sort order, and a difficulty rating
Before — Create Challenge
×New ChallengeNext
Cover
+ Add cover
Challenge name
Description
Type
RankStreakParticipation
Scoring
MetricBest score▾
Unitreps▾
Higher is better
LeaderboardOnOff
Everyone submits one best result.
Create challenge
×New ChallengeNext
Cover
+ Add cover
Challenge name
Description
Type
RankStreakParticipation
Duration
Length−30+
Check-inEvery day▾
Rest days allowed
LeaderboardOnOff
Show up every day until it ends.
Create challenge
×New ChallengeNext
Cover
+ Add cover
Challenge name
Description
Type
RankStreakParticipation
Goal
MilestonesOne-time
Target−10+
Count byPosting▾
Each post marks one step toward your goal.
Create challenge
After — by type

A working AI prototype helped move the team forward

Napoz AI

Simpler setup still left creators with the writing. I proposed AI-assisted drafting, but the founder raised concerns about cost and engineering effort. Working with engineering, I built a lightweight text-generation prototype that gave us something concrete to evaluate. It helped secure approval and ship the feature.

The flow settled into three steps: describe an idea, review the generated draft, publish. Creators get a head start without giving up control. I later prototyped the next version of Create with AI — the demo at the top of this page.

First iteration — a bare Napoz AI sheet with placeholder copy and a disabled Confirm
Second iteration — describing a streak challenge in one typed line
Second iteration — reviewing the drafted title, prompt, and cover before publishing
First lightweight implementation

As I rebuilt Create, I realized the existing design system couldn't support the product we were designing.

That became its own piece of work — a new brand color, type system and component library — told in Part 02, the Design System.

Part 02 · Design System What did a simpler Create need underneath it? A token foundation where every color has one job, a named type ramp, a real button hierarchy, and one Challenge object that keeps its shape on every surface. Read Part 02
Faster creation, higher completion, and growth in weekly activity
5 → 1 min
average challenge creation time
+47%
creation completion rate
+15%
weekly active users

Napoz still supports wildly different challenges. Users just don't have to configure every possibility themselves.

Napoz is live on iOS and Android — see it on the App Store.

What I took away

I learned to design AI as a reusable interaction pattern:

  1. 01Understand user intent
  2. 02Translate it into configuration
  3. 03Review and confirm

Challenge creation demonstrated how this approach could reduce manual setup and decision-making. That pattern could become a template for other complex flows.

The broader opportunity is to scale this approach across the product—helping users express what they want while AI handles more of the setup, with user control built in.

Next · Part 02
Design System — Napoz
→