In 2015, Yubl was a UK-based social messaging startup trying to carve out a space in a market dominated by WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger. Founded by Jonathan Ellis, a British entrepreneur known for co-founding Psygnosis and helping launch the original Sony PlayStation, the venture had serious ambitions. Its big idea was to go beyond basic texting by letting users create interactive posts – polls, count buttons, live location sharing, and link buttons. This offered people new ways to connect and gave brands a direct channel for creative engagement. I joined the Yubl team as a UI Designer & UX Researcher during the frenzy of pre-launch, excited by the chance to help shape this product from the ground up.
Task
Design and deliver the interface for a new social messaging app - creating a visual language, defining interaction patterns, and embedding user research in a fast-moving startup pre-launch.
Designing Yubl’s interface turned out to be a crash course in creativity under constraint. The company had committed to a fixed launch date, but when I started there was no established brand identity – no logo, no color scheme, not even defined values or voice.
I was tasked with translating rough UX specs into a polished, intuitive UI essentially from scratch. In other words, I had to establish a visual language and interaction patterns with nothing to anchor to, all while the feature set kept evolving and the clock was ticking.
It was an early-career challenge that forced me to balance speed with thoughtfulness: how do you deliver a high-quality, differentiated product experience when you’re still defining the very basics of the brand?
For the UI itself, I focused on making Yubl feel simple and engaging despite its novel features. Our design process spanned the key parts of the experience – from the public feed, to the content composer, to the interactive “Yubl buttons” that set the app apart.
Designed for clarity and content ownership.
Reorganized layout and type hierarchy to make posts feel personal, not generic.
Yubl’s creative engine.
Refined icons, microcopy, and layout to make post creation playful and intuitive.
Core to Yubl’s difference.
Designed Vote, Count, Link, and Location buttons to feel native and invite action.
For a fast-moving startup, taking time for user research was almost unheard of – but we made it happen, and it proved invaluable. Early on, I conducted an internal audit, consulting nearly every Yubl employee (around 80 people) to gather their perspectives.
This exercise surfaced a laundry list of assumptions, pain points, and pet ideas floating around the company. It set the stage for what we needed to investigate with real users.
With a newly hired user researcher on board, we then moved to formal usability testing. We recruited 10 people who had never heard of Yubl and observed them as they tried out the app in a controlled setting.
Each participant downloaded Yubl fresh, signed up, explored the feed, added friends, and attempted to create a post. Our goals were straightforward: find serious usability problems, see if users understood the novel features, and gather ideas for improvement.
The sessions were revealing. Participants were excited by Yubl’s concept — they loved the idea of doing more than just texting. But confusion set in quickly. Several users weren’t sure how the interactive features actually worked, and many assumed Yubl was simply “another messaging app” based on the intro screens.
One tester even asked if it was “like WhatsApp with extras.” We also discovered that some of Yubl’s terminology added to the confusion – for instance, the difference between “Public” and “Private” modes wasn’t clear to anyone at first glance.
By the end of testing, we had a mountain of feedback and one telling metric: Yubl’s System Usability Scale (SUS) score came out to 60 out of 100. That score is about average, giving us a baseline benchmark (and plenty of room to improve). Still, having this data was a big step for the team — it shifted conversations from “I think” to “the users showed us.”
for a product still defining itself.
System Usability Scale score from lab testing (established benchmark for iteration).
Internal consultation with nearly every Yubl employee to surface assumptions and issues.
Vote, Count, Link, and Location buttons designed and launched.statements after redesign.
Early UI delivered and validated through usability testing before launch.
By launch day, our work had
made a tangible impact…
First UI delivered:
I produced Yubl’s first production-ready interface in time for launch. In the process, I established a preliminary design system — defining typography, colors, and basic components from scratch — since no brand guidelines existed yet.
Research-driven improvements:
Our research pinpointed critical usability issues (for example, confusing onboarding copy) and informed quick design fixes. These early UX efforts also nudged the company culture from opinion-driven debates toward evidence-based decision making.
Unique features validated:
Yubl’s interactive posts proved their worth. Brands like Warehouse and ASOS jumped on board early, using polls and interactive buttons in their content to engage users. Seeing real organizations leverage these features validated Yubl’s core concept and differentiators.
Baseline for UX metrics:
We established a benchmark usability score (SUS 60/100) to measure against going forward. It wasn’t a stellar number, but it gave the team a clear starting point and motivation to continuously improve the experience.
Problem framing
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Opportunity mapping
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Sythesis
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User Testing
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Yubl_proj_slides.002 (1)
ƒ/5.6 • 135.0 mm • 1/200 (640) • Flash (off, did not fire)
Yubl was my baptism by fire as a designer. It was a high-pressure, ambiguous environment, and I had to make big design decisions without a safety net. Looking back now, I realize how formative that experience was. Being forced to build a visual and UX foundation from scratch taught me the importance of nailing the basics — getting typography, color, and hierarchy right — even when everything else is in flux. And seeing users struggle with (and eventually embrace) our product instilled in me a deep respect for clarity: clarity in onboarding, in copy, and in every interaction.
If I were to revisit this project now, I would do a few things differently. I’d design a stronger onboarding experience from the start, to immediately highlight what makes Yubl special and prevent that “just another chat app” misconception. I would also turn our scrappy style guide into a more robust design system for the long term, so the visual language could scale more easily as the product grew.
That said, the rapid-fire approach we took was exactly what Yubl needed at the time. In the years since, I’ve applied the same blend of speed and user-centered thinking to more mature projects — just with a bit more finesse. Yubl gave me a crash course in balancing fast delivery with thoughtful design, a lesson that continues to guide my work today.