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Lips onboarding

UX/UI design
April 2020 — January 2021


CEO & Founder — Annie Brown
Community Manager — Val Elefante
Development — Bitcot
Brand style guide — Ileana Lapaz

Lips is a progressive web app by Reliabl, for wom*n and LGBTQ+ creators to express themselves freely, without biased censorship. With patent-pending ML & Blockchain features to prevent biased censorship, harassment & plagiarism.
Since launch at the end 2020, Lips maintains 25k monthly users.

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

This is an overview of Lips' core functionality: 3 levels of engagement.










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.








Browse

View recent public posts sorted by hashtags.




Register

To communicate the brand's values to new users, the registration introduces Lips' community guidelines, lets them choose their privacy level, and prompts them to select their initial hashtag preferences.






Get approved

When ready, users can request approval by describing why they want to post on Lips. The application is then reviewed by the moderators.

Some can skip the Services by entering a code issued by the moderators.







Learnings

Revising the role of non-approved users

Currently a significant part of Lips' user base are unapproved. They only follow and love other's content, but do not intend to post their own. Some have intentionally used their profile and cover pictures to upload harmful content.

The following design phase will explore ways to both activelly prevent harmful non-approved users and encourage more upcoming creators to request approval.


Better onboarding to tags

Currently a significant amount of users do not use the hashtag system as intended. As a result, some potentially sensitive content cannot be filtered out by tags and users are distressed. To ensure good tag-based filtering, the second version of Lips will make it easier for users to learn and use the tag system, as well as possibly include other modes of filtering content.

To ensure tags work for everyone, more qualitative and generative research around them will be conducted.










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site developed by Julija Rukanskaitė, based on software by Rasmus Andersson, 2019