Role
Sole Product Designer
Tools/Skills
Figma, Prototyping
Team
1 Software Engineer
Timeline
June 2025, 2 weeks
Every summer, Beli releases Midyear Snack — a personalized recap of users’ dining adventures. In 2025, our goal was to make it feel more social, personal, and worth sharing. I designed the full experience end-to-end, crafting a recap that captured the warmth of summer dining while driving a 53% MoM growth in unique viewers.
BACKGROUND
QUESTION
How might we create a Midyear Snack experience that leverages our users’ audiences to convert non-Beli users into Beli users?
GOALS
Maximize number of non-Beli users that see Midyear Snack content
Maximize the conversion from seeing Midyear Snack content to becoming a Beli user
To ground our recap in proven engagement patterns, I analyzed social and app-based year-in-review experiences — from Spotify Wrapped and Apple Music Replay to NYT and Strava. These products balance personal data with cultural storytelling. From Spotify, we drew on bright color palettes and modular templates; from Peloton and Strava, milestone framing and progress metrics. We also noted how Airbuds and Duolingo use clear CTAs and exportable visuals to fuel social sharing.
These insights shaped both our creative direction and interaction model, ensuring Midyear Snack felt fresh yet instantly recognizable within the recap genre.
RESEARCH AND INSPIRATION
STUDYING WHAT MAKES RECAP EXPERIENCES GO VIRAL
High Contrast
Maximalist: stacked shapes, sticker-like food objects, playful whitespace
Funky sans-serifs, warped serif fonts, 3D distortions, grid-aligned titles
I explored multiple visual directions before landing on a picnic theme — a natural fit for summer, food, and community. Inspired by the nostalgic energy of Coney Island, I developed a visual language of checkered textures, plate-style stat cards, and playful food-inspired accents.
The theme provided a flexible visual framework that felt joyful yet clean, allowing each slide to stay on-brand while highlighting user data.
SETTLING ON A THEME - A DAY IN CONEY ISLAND
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
DESIGN ITERATION
Feedback from our CEO and engineer showed that emphasizing peer ranking made the recap more shareable. This led to the “Top x% Diner” framing and guided how rank data was visualized.
We refined the recap through multiple rounds of iteration — testing typography, pacing, and transitions to make each slide effortless to read and share. To ensure visual consistency across dozens of screens, I built a unified typographic and color system that handled long restaurant names and variable data gracefully, pairing playful summer tones with brand patterns for a polished, share-ready look.
REFINING MOTION, HIERARCHY AND SHAREABILITY, ACROSS ITERATION
After finalizing the visual direction, I built a fully interactive prototype in Figma to capture the intended flow, timing, and animations for the Midyear Snack. Working closely with our CEO and software engineer, I validated what was feasible on both the frontend (animations, layout responsiveness, asset optimization) and backend (data retrieval, dynamic slide generation, and scalability for all users).
I prepared developer-ready files with organized layers, named components, and clear documentation to minimize ambiguity. All assets — including background patterns, typography specifications, and brand imagery — were exported in optimized formats for fast load times. Throughout the build, I remained in close collaboration with engineering, providing quick feedback on in-progress staging builds and making adjustments to ensure the final implementation matched the intended design.
IMPLEMENT AND HANDOFF
FROM PICNIC SPREAD TO USER FEED
OUTCOMES AND TAKEAWAYS
WHAT WE SERVED & WHAT WE LEARNED
Onboarding
@ Frich
Outcomes
Reached
Drove
Increased share rate by
validating improvements
in layout clarity
In First 2 weeks of launch
In First 2 weeks of launch
1.5 Million + Unique Views
User Converstions
53% MoM increase in engagement
40% compared to the previous year’s recap
Boosted non-Beli
Established a reusable design system for future recap experiences
Praised internally for strong cross-team collaboration and execution speed across design, engineering, and leadership.
through shareable recap links.
Reinforced that small interaction details—timing, motion, hierarchy—can define whether a feature feels celebratory or
forgettable.
Designing for shareability means balancing personal aesthetics with scalable systems, where visuals should feel unique to
each user.
Onboarding
@ Frich
Takeaways
Learned how to prototype for feasibility, bridging front-end animations and backend data to ensure design intent matched
real implementation.
Designing
@ Beli