See Around Me
A personal side project: a hyperlocal discovery app I built to learn product design from the ground up, then rebuilt around real user research.
I started See Around Me to test an idea I cared about and to learn design and product skills firsthand. After an early hybrid app launched on both app stores, downloads grew but retention lagged: research pointed to two causes, UI/UX quality and stale content.
Working with product designers from Tradecraft, I spent nearly two months on usability testing, surveys, and interviews to understand who was using the app and why. That surfaced two personas (a younger, trend-driven user and an older, community-oriented one) and a set of Jobs-to-be-Done (USMO) that shaped new task flows.
From there we moved into Sketch, iterating lo-fi to hi-fi and testing assumptions at each step, then validated the redesign with a clickable prototype and another round of usability testing. I knew little about product design when I started, and this project is largely why I care about it now.