Wrally
UI Design for a startup creating a social media app for event finding with friends.
Introduction
Planning a night out shouldn’t feel like assembling IKEA furniture. Yet friends still juggle texts, polls, maps, and spreadsheets just to meet up. Enter Wrally—an event-finding and group-messaging app I designed end-to-end as the startup’s first and only designer. My remit: validate the idea, probe real pain points, and craft a single place where people can discover happenings, launch gatherings, and keep everyone in sync. How do you fuse planning, chat, and discovery without the bloat that sinks most “super-apps”?
Client:
Wrally
My Role:
Founding Product Designer
Service Provided:
Web Design, Framer Development
Process
I surveyed 180 users and interviewed 22 planners, birthday hosts, and spur-of-the-moment socializers. Three friction zones popped:
Fragmented tools – hopping between iMessage, Google Sheets, and Eventbrite kills momentum.
Trust gap – last-minute no-shows make hosts wary of public invites.
Discovery dead-ends – people want fresh ideas but default to the same bars.
Affinity maps steered scope toward a lean MVP: social feed, discovery, and event chat—all mobile-first. I created wireframes and conducted through two tests in UChicago’s student center; copy tweaks alone lifted task success by 25 %. Visual design leaned on warm gradients and doodles to keep the vibe casual. By sprint five, we locked flows for feed, quick-create, and RSVP tracking and handed specs to engineering.
Result
Wrally’s beta delivered:
Social Event Feed – see what friends plan and join in a tap.
Quick Overview – calendar cards keep RSVPs, budgets, and weather in view.
Streamlined Creation – draft, tag friends, set caps, go live in 60 seconds.
Event Chat Hub – messages, polls, and file-drop live with the invite.
In month one, hosts cut planning time by 48%, and 68% of users said Wrally “replaced three apps at once.”
A 500-person waitlist validated the concept; v1 funding also got secured. As part of a marketing initiative, I created foundational brand design with a playful Instagram carousel featuring five doodle-rich frames tackling “plan-pain” one-liners—hit 2k viewers and a 34 % CTR, seeding buzz before launch and confirming Wrally’s tone resonated with its target crowd.
