Lips User Activation for a Social Media Platform

2020 — 2021

Lips is a progressive web app by Reliabl, for womenand LGBTQ+ creators to express themselves freely, without biased censorship. With built-in moderation features to prevent biased censorship, harassment & plagiarism.

I designed the Lips app end-to-end, from feature scoping to buttons, grounding my Services in co-creation and long-term product strategy.

Problem

Harassment on and discriminatory moderation policies of mainstream social media platforms unproportionally affect women and the lgbtqia+ artists.

Lips centers these unfairly censored and demonetized communities and aims to become the go-to alternative for them and their followers to share, connect, and monetize their content in creative ways.

Services

Vision and feature exploration

To better understand Lip's vision, I worked closely with the founder and Lips creator community to ideate and map out possible app features.

Low-fi prototype testing & co-design

Conducted more than 20 remote one-on-one in-depth user tests with targer user groups. Designed and led 3 remote co-design sessions with key stakeholder groups: artists, brand representatives, and their followers.

High-fi prototyping & handoff

Iterated, scoped and created a high-fi interactive prototype based on user research and viable development costs. Provided detailed information architecture specifications + an interactive prototype with UI component specs.

Snapshot of the co-design board

Design

Lips' information architecture is based on 3 levels of engagement. Users can either browse through recent public posts, create an account to follow others, or request approval and become a fully-fledged lips user.

This protects and centers creators while allowing easier content moderation and not excluding the creator's fans from the platform.

Learnings

Revising the role of non-approved users

Analysis reveals that a substantial portion of Lips' user base remains unapproved, primarily engaging through following and liking content without posting intent. This segment has also been exploited by bad actors who leverage profile and cover images to distribute harmful content.

The next design iteration will implement proactive moderation mechanisms to mitigate harmful non-approved user behavior while creating clearer pathways for emerging creators to gain posting approval.

Optimizing content classification

User research identified significant misalignment between intended hashtag usage and actual user behavior, resulting in ineffective content filtering and negative user experiences. The next iteration will introduce improved content classification workflows and educational interventions to align user behavior with the tag system's design intent. Additional content filtering mechanisms will complement tag-based classification to ensure comprehensive content moderation.

Ongoing qualitative and generative research will inform the evolution of the classification system to better serve diverse user needs.