Process
How I approached it
A structured path from discovery through UI — research and persona work up front, then flows and wireframes, validated with testing before committing to high-fidelity design.
A two-sided influencer marketplace had to launch from nothing — connecting brands and influencers with no existing product to build on. As founding designer (employee #3), I owned the full arc: discovery and research, personas, flows, wireframes, and final UI for a brand web app and an influencer mobile app. The startup launched and grew into what operates today as InHype.
Influencers had become the trusted source for purchasing advice, and brands were scrambling to work with them — but the process was manual, messy, and hard to scale. There was no clean way for a brand to brief, pick, pay, and track an influencer campaign in one place.
The vision: a web platform where brands run influencer campaigns, paired with a mobile app where influencers receive briefs, submit content for approval, and get paid — two products that talk to each other across one workflow.
A structured path from discovery through UI — research and persona work up front, then flows and wireframes, validated with testing before committing to high-fidelity design.
I started with competitive and SWOT analysis of existing players, plus desk research on the influencer-marketing landscape. A few numbers made the opportunity clear:
Traditional advertising was losing reach; word-of-mouth via influencers was where attention and trust had moved. The demand was real — the missing piece was the infrastructure to run it.
The most important research finding wasn't about user preferences. It was structural: Instagram and Facebook actively made influencer marketing hard — blocking automatic posting, restricting scheduled posts, and adding sponsored labels to paid content. Any platform in this space had to work around the social networks, not assume cooperation from them.
My solution: influencers create and save their post inside our app ahead of time. At the scheduled moment, they get a notification, open it, and the post is pulled into Instagram or Facebook pre-built — they simply tap publish. It respects the platforms' rules while still giving brands the scheduling and reliability they needed. That single design decision shaped the entire influencer-side flow.
I built personas for both sides of the marketplace. Brands were segmented by size (small, medium, large — each with a different point of contact and level of marketing sophistication). On the influencer side, research pointed to micro-influencers (2,000–50,000 followers) as the sweet spot for brands — affordable, high-engagement, and spanning every vertical from food to fashion to travel.
With personas set, I mapped the end-to-end journey both sides move through — brand briefs, influencer creates, brand approves and pays, post publishes on schedule, results get tracked. I broke it into a clear sequential flow so the two apps stayed in sync at every handoff. On the brand side, I ran surveys and analyzed real campaign briefs to design an online brief form that captured everything a campaign needs.
I explored layouts in wireframes before any visual design — a homepage built to sell the concept and split clearly into a brand path and an influencer path, then conversion-focused screens once a user committed to a direction.
The visual design went clean, white, and modern — letting imagery lead, the way social platforms do. The two products were styled to be unmistakable: a web app for brands, a mobile app for influencers, so no one ever wondered which experience they were in.
Early-career project (2015–2017). Visuals are the original artifacts from the work. Shown here to demonstrate end-to-end process; some company specifics have evolved since.
