App Redesign and Design Library Creation

1 Second Everyday, 2020

Intro

Implementing a Much-Needed Early Design System

I joined 1 Second Everyday as their first full-time designer, stepping into a role that came with the opportunity to shape the app’s visual identity. At that time, the app had been operational for several years, and a part-time contractor had previously provided visual design support as needed. However, there were no established component libraries, design systems, or branding guidelines.

My initial project involved assessing the existing design framework within the app. I discovered a wide array of color variations and styles, reflecting the ad hoc nature of the early startup phase. Unfortunately, this lack of cohesion resulted in inconsistencies, insufficient accessibility, and a disconnect from our user base.

My Role

Creator of Unimorphic Design Library

During my first two years at 1 Second Everyday, I focused intensively on enhancing the user experience and developing major features within the app. By the summer of 2020, our team was ready to revisit the app’s visual design. To lead the comprehensive reskinning of the app, I took the following steps:

Workshop Facilitation: I organized a collaborative workshop with leadership, marketing, and design teams to establish a new visual direction for 1 Second Everyday.
High-Fidelity Mockups: Based on the insights gained from the workshop, I created high-fidelity mockups for key screens in the app.
Atomic Design Component Library: Once the mockups were finalized and approved, I developed a detailed “atomic design” component library to ensure consistency and scalability.
Design System Implementation: I then implemented the new design system across all existing screens in the app.

Ideation

Identifying a New Visual Direction

Although our product team was predominantly male, over 85% of our users identified as female, resulting in an app design that did not align with our user base’s preferences.

To address this, I began by researching popular UI trends and organizing my findings in a Miro board. I invited leadership and marketing to contribute their insights as well. Together, we discussed which styles resonated with our brand and product, highlighting the reasons behind our choices. We used stickers to mark the styles we believed were best suited for our users based on feedback gathered from user interviews.

From this collaborative effort, I selected the designs that received the most stickers and created mockups of key screens in those styles. We engaged in further discussions and voting until we ultimately settled on neumorphism. While this trending UI aesthetic was appealing, we felt it suited our product due to the physical nature of video cameras and journaling that we aimed to modernize within our app. However, I believed it was essential to adapt neumorphism to create our unique interpretation—one that was softer and less literal. The result was Unimorphism, 1 Second Everyday’s distinctive design style.

Designing in Three Dimensions

One of the challenges in developing a neumorphic component library was effectively managing drop shadows and highlights. Achieving a sense of realism while accurately representing depth within the app required careful mathematical calculations and thoughtful design considerations. To determine the appropriate drop shadow for each screen, I modeled the elements from a side view, ensuring that no objects visually overlapped or “ran into each other.”

Results

Improved Accessibility, Consistency, and Alignment with Users

By addressing accessibility issues related to contrast, font size, and weight, we drastically improved the legibility of our app. Although there was still more work to be done regarding dynamic type, localization, and other accessibility tools offered by Apple, we made significant progress from where our app had started.

I consolidated our color palette and font styles to less than half of what our old style guide included. We adopted an icon library with consistent weights and implemented both light and dark modes.

Our component library grew and evolved as we developed new features, continually improving along the way!

Project Gallery

Overview

As the first full-time designer at 1 Second Everyday, I crafted a cohesive design system for a growing user base that reached 9 million accounts by 2022. My work helped the app gain recognition as an App Store feature.

Expanded Design Role on a Small Team

In a dynamic, small-team environment, my responsibilities at 1 Second Everyday extended beyond UX/UI. I conducted user interviews, analyzed data insights via Flurry, and used events/funnels to refine design priorities. I collaborated closely with stakeholders to align design decisions with business goals and investor needs, acting in a partial project management capacity to handle prioritization and write Jira tickets. I led design handoffs with mockups, acceptance criteria, and QA notes, while also reviewing QA and customer success feedback to ensure a seamless user experience across every release.

Project Spotlight: Optimizing User Retention at 1 Second Everyday

In one project focused on boosting user retention, I led an iterative process that combined successes, learnings, and some challenges. Our primary objective, aligned with quarterly business goals, was to increase user retention by understanding the typical user journey—many download the app after seeing friends’ New Year’s posts, only to lose momentum quickly.

Need for a New Strategy for User Engagement

We aimed to address retention because most users joined in January but quickly lost interest—only about 25% stayed past the first month, and fewer than 2% made it through the first year. This high drop-off rate indicated a need for strategies to keep new users engaged, helping them see the app’s value over time rather than just around the New Year season.

Boosting Retention with Impactful Onboarding

Through user research and data analysis, I identified several key opportunities to boost retention. While we ultimately implemented each of these improvements, I’ll focus on optimizing the onboarding process. We chose onboarding as our starting point because it had a direct impact on retention and was low-hanging fruit: every user encounters it before any significant drop-off occurs, so even small adjustments could yield substantial gains.

Impact of Day-One Engagement on Long-Term Retention

To tackle the steep drop-off rates, I analyzed user behavior on day one. Across all users, retention was only 25% by the end of the first month, with most leaving well before then. However, for users who added a snippet on day one, 30-day retention increased to 39%, making these users three times more likely to stay active for a full year. This insight became a key driver in optimizing our onboarding experience, as early engagement showed a direct correlation with longer-term retention.

Streamlining Onboarding and Enhancing Upsell Opportunities

Initially, my focus was on reskinning the existing onboarding flow to align with our new design library without altering its core functionality. The process was designed to be quick and efficient, ensuring users could dive into their first project seamlessly. One significant improvement was the placement of the PRO upsell on the second screen. After numerous iterations, this positioning consistently yielded the best performance, effectively enticing users to explore premium features early in their journey.

Test 1: Optimizing the Onboarding Flow

In the first test, we streamlined the onboarding process by removing the privacy policy screen and linking it directly under the account creation section. This adjustment shortened the onboarding flow and eliminated unnecessary information that could overwhelm new users.

Contextual Onboarding: Learn by Doing

We implemented contextual onboarding to enhance the user experience by allowing users to learn through hands-on interaction. Users were guided to record their first snippet and trim it during the onboarding process, with the option to replace it later if they weren’t satisfied with the initial recording.

Analyzing User Feedback and Data

After running the contextual onboarding experiment for a couple of weeks, I analyzed the onboarding funnel data and noticed a significant drop-off at a crucial point in the process. To gain further insights, I reached out to some users for feedback.

Testing a New Hypothesis for Enhanced Engagement

Based on the insights gathered from user feedback, we decided to test a different hypothesis aimed at improving user engagement during onboarding. The new approach involved asking users for library access at the beginning and creating a personalized mash for them starting January 1.

Key Learnings: A Significant Improvement

The recent changes to the onboarding process led to a significant increase in completion rates. Among users who finished onboarding, an impressive 99% now have between 1 to 90 snippets in their first project. Feedback from users highlighted a shift in mindset: they no longer felt pressured to start on January 1st and appreciated the ability to add content retroactively. The inclusion of live photos as videos further enhanced their understanding of the app’s functionality.

Design Iterations and Hypothesis Testing

During the design process, we explored multiple hypotheses and iterations before settling on the final solutions. While I don’t have artifacts from the earlier stages—such as flow charts, sticky notes, and wireframes—these tools were instrumental in guiding us toward our ultimate design decisions.

Measurable Results Over One Year

After implementing our design changes, we observed a remarkable threefold increase in yearly user retention. Additionally, there was a notable rise in pro subscriptions, as the enhancements encouraged users to engage more deeply with the app, reaching the point of creating and potentially exporting their mashes. This feature not only improved retention but also facilitated our transition from a year-in-review focus to a month-in-review app, complemented by updates to the project menu.

Exploring Gamification and Social Features

In addition to our primary focus on onboarding optimization, we also investigated opportunities for integrating gamification elements and social features into the app. These enhancements aimed to further boost user engagement and retention by creating a more interactive and community-driven experience.

Gamification Enhancements

We introduced several gamification elements to enhance user engagement, including streaks and stats displayed on user profiles, as well as reward systems encouraging users to complete tasks for free access to pro features. We also included Easter egg badges that users could collect as app icons. While we observed an increase in retention following these implementations, and users reported positive experiences anecdotally, we faced challenges in measuring the impact quantitatively. Despite this, the overall enthusiasm for these features suggested they resonated well with our user base.

Making it Social

In response to investor demands, we embarked on a year-long journey to implement social features within the app. This included the launch of 1SE Crowds, allowing users to follow friends and connect with others who share similar interests. Our aim was to create a social feedback loop that would encourage app engagement through meaningful notifications, rather than inundating users with a never-ending feed.