A community platform for 500K+ enthusiasts, shipped in four weeks.
How I designed the UI and visual language for 91 Wheels' community product from concept to launch — achieving a 4.6/5 app store rating and 92% feature adoption in the first quarter.
A passionate audience without a place to gather.
91 Wheels had built a sizeable audience of car and bike enthusiasts through editorial content — but readers had nowhere to talk to each other. Engagement was happening on third-party platforms the company had no visibility into. The team wanted to own the relationship.
The brief was tight: design a community product — feeds, posts, profiles, comments, content discovery — from scratch in four weeks. It had to work on mobile and web, scale to half a million users on day one, and feel like a natural extension of the brand.
I joined as the sole designer.
The product had to feel like coming home for a community that didn't know it needed one yet.
Research first, even with the clock running.
Four weeks is short. But shipping without understanding the user is shorter. I ran 15 user interviews in the first five days — mostly existing readers, mixed across age and vehicle type — alongside a competitive analysis of vertical communities (Strava, Letterboxd, Reddit auto subs).
Three insights anchored every design decision after:
One. Enthusiasts want to be seen for what they own and how they ride — the profile is the product. Two. Discovery beats search; users want to stumble into things. Three. Photos are the universal language — text-first feeds would have flopped.
A cross-platform design system, built once.
Because the product had to launch on mobile AND web simultaneously, I built a responsive component library in Figma with strict tokens — type scale, spacing, color, motion. Every component was designed to scale from a 360px mobile viewport up to a 1440px web breakpoint without redrawing.
The typographic scale — one display family for impact, one body family for density — doubled as the brand voice. The color palette borrowed from the brand's editorial heritage but added a warmer, friendlier accent for the community context.
Engineering handoff was direct: the same tokens shipped to React Native and Next.js.
Shipped on time, and then some.
We launched on day 28 of a 28-day brief. Within the first quarter, the community grew to over half a million monthly active users. App store rating settled at 4.6/5. Feature adoption hit 92% within the first quarter — a number the product team had set as a 6-month stretch goal. Daily active users grew 35% as we iterated on the post composer based on early usage data.
Results that moved the business.
What I'd do differently.
Looking back, the four-week timeline was a feature, not a bug — it forced decisions and prevented over-engineering. But two things I'd push for next time:
Earlier moderation tooling. We shipped without a robust mod system and paid for it within month two. A bare-bones admin view designed alongside the user UI would have saved scramble work.
An accessibility audit before launch, not after. We hit WCAG 2.1 AA in version 1.2, but contrast issues caught at launch cost us a week of patching. I now bake accessibility into the design tokens themselves.