What if social media actually became social again?

Leading social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are no longer about being social. Almost all content displayed on these apps are not shared by friends, but instead by professional influencers. What if there was a social media product that wasn't only about the doomscroll?

At Biography, I transformed this vague idea into a real, tangible app. I was responsible for not only leading the two-person design team for this project, but also for driving product strategy, deciding the feature set, aligning the team, and—most importantly—perfecting every single pixel of the interface.

Post on Currents faster than anywhere else.

Posting is the most important feature of our app, and it needed to be delightful, efficient, and simple. Unlike other social media apps, post creation on Currents happens within the feed itself (instead of in a separate sheet or subpage), reducing tons of friction. To add an extra layer of delight, I created a suite of colorful gradients that would appear behind the text box.

An app that works in both light and dark mode, powered by a design library that cut frontend lift nearly in half.

The library allows for both light and dark mode and allowed for all pages in the app to be composed of structured components, rather than hardcoded by hand. Along the way, I learned SwiftUI to help set the library up in Xcode, created rigorous typography and color systems, and set up robust and detailed documentation to ensure proper handoff. The library ended up having over 3,000+ variants!

After ten long weeks, we launched our beta, climbed the App Store charts, and raised at a $30M dollar seed valuation.

I joined Biography at the beginning of the summer, and everything since still feels like a fever dream. I cannot put into words how much I've grown from working with the incredible and brilliant Biography team. I grew much more confident in myself and my work, and learned how to stand up for my ideas without being stubborn or unreceptive to feedback. I also learned how to best set up prototypes for developers to implement and communicate in a fast-paced environment with a ton of people all working on different projects. It was a lot of trial and error, a lot of late nights, and a lot of last-minute scrambles. But somehow, we made it to the other side!

What's next for this project?

We're currently working on gathering user feedback to improve our product. While I am unable to show any of the new iterations I've been working on until we properly ship these refinements, I'm excited for the next chapter!

A quick update: we recently pulled Currents back into closed beta as we gather user feedback and work on improving the product for a proper launch. This unfortunately means that we're no longer allowing new sign-ups to the app for a little bit. But stay tuned, it's about to get a whole lot better!