Ember Marketplace
Rebuilding for Growth: Designing Ember’s Consumer App for Scale
IOS & Android App
2024 (6 Months)
Ember
Lead Product Designer (0–1 ownership)
Setting the Challenge
Reframing the rebuild around purpose aligned the team and set the foundation for long-term success.
Ember, a London-based discovery app, was originally built on Unity — but technical limitations made it hard to scale, slowed development, and created usability issues. The business decided to rebuild in React Native.
Instead of treating this as a purely technical rebuild, I argued we should step back and define Ember’s purpose first — ensuring the product vision would guide design and development, not just tech constraints.
Finding Our “Just Cause”
Clarifying Ember’s purpose after years of iteration united the team and gave the rebuild a clear direction.
Before this rebuild, the company had gone through several iterations — originally launched as Bindy Street and evolving its offering over time. By the time we started the React Native rebuild, Ember’s purpose was unclear, and the team risked treating the project as a technical exercise rather than a strategic reset.
To realign, I facilitated a company-wide Just Cause workshop with 25 teammates. Together, we defined our purpose:
“We imagine a future where every week you and your friends can find new personalised things to do, wherever you may be.”
We also identified five values — personalisation, discovery, community, creation, and fulfilment. These became our compass for design, shaping every feature and interaction that followed.
Listening to Users
Real-world field testing showed users weren’t struggling with a lack of content, but with too many options — and missing tools for planning and reviewing with friends.
We ran a field test with 8 of our existing users, giving them a small budget and sending them out in London with a friend. Their task: use Ember to find something to do or eat together.
Two major gaps emerged:
Choice overload — users felt overwhelmed by too many options, making discovery frustrating instead of exciting.
Missing social elements — when planning with friends, users had no way to coordinate or review experiences afterward. This felt like a critical gap in the app’s promise of shared discovery.
As Ava, an outgoing young professional, explained: she could find plenty of things to do, but struggled to choose what was right for her and her friends — and couldn’t reflect on the experience afterward.
Designing for Simplicity
Reimagining the app around Ember’s purpose and values — not just features — turned user feedback into a clear design compass.
With our Just Cause and values as a compass — and field test insights in hand — we reimagined the Ember app from the ground up. Instead of simply porting old features into React Native, we used the rebuild as a chance to redesign the experience around purpose.
Every design decision was guided by two anchors:
Our values (personalisation, discovery, community, creation, fulfilment)
User feedback (choice overload, missing planning and review, smoother group discovery)
Wireframes became the tool to explore this reimagined direction. Over two weeks, we tested and iterated with the tech and content teams, ensuring our vision stayed feasible while pushing toward a more focused, social, and purpose-driven experience.
Prototyping the Experience
Rapid high-fidelity prototyping gave us a clear picture of the new experience, enabling quick iteration before committing to full detail.
Once we were confident in the low-fidelity direction, we began detailing the overall experience in high fidelity. At this stage, we didn’t account for every edge case — the goal was to prototype the new experience quickly and test it in action.
Through multiple iterations and interactive prototypes, we refined the flows and gained confidence in how the rebuilt Ember would feel.
Establishing a Design System
A design system built from scratch gave the team reusable components and long-term scalability.
With the new experience validated, we focused on consistency and scalability. I established Ember’s first design system, including foundations (colours, typography, grids) and reusable components (navigation, cards, buttons) across iOS and Android.
This system gave developers reusable building blocks and reduced ambiguity, making the following sprints faster and more consistent.
Sprint 1: Laying the Foundation
Starting with core flows, from onboarding to events, ensured Ember was usable from day one and built trust with returning users.
The first sprint focused on rebuilding the essential pillars of the app. We prioritised the flows every user would encounter from day one:
Onboarding and account creation
Venue profiles and listings
Event discovery and promotions
Search and explore
This gave us a stable foundation for Ember’s marketplace, ensuring the basics worked seamlessly while introducing time-sensitive engagement through events and offers.
Sprint 2: Creation & Enhanced Discovery
Enhancing guides and collections transformed discovery from overwhelming to personalised, driving deeper engagement.
With the foundations in place, we turned to the heart of Ember’s value: curation. This sprint reimagined our guides and collections to make discovery feel more personalised and less overwhelming.
Redesigned guide creation for clarity and speed
Enhanced collections for bookmarking and sharing
Improved navigation between guides, venues, and collections to reduce context switching
These changes directly tackled the choice overload uncovered in research, helping users and creators find and share relevant experiences with far less friction.
Sprint 3: Social Foundations
Building social features alongside safety tools laid the foundation for sustainable community growth.
The third sprint shifted focus to community and safety. We expanded profiles and laid the groundwork for social features:
Friends and followers
Reporting and blocking (to prepare for user-generated content)
This sprint also marked a milestone: we replaced the Unity app entirely with the new React Native build.
After launch, subsequent sprints focused on reducing onboarding drop-off and improving retention rates, iterating based on real user feedback.
Building Together
Tight design–tech collaboration reduced debt and accelerated delivery.
To keep delivery efficient, design and engineering worked in tandem:
Designs were finalised alongside tech estimates to reduce rework.
Developers used the design system as reusable building blocks.
Designers stayed one sprint ahead, proactively delivering specs and documentation.
This rhythm reduced technical debt and accelerated progress across four sprint cycles.
Relaunch & Impact
The rebuild unlocked faster development and rapid user growth.
The rebuilt Ember app launched to strong results:
80% of existing users returned
25,000+ new users within weeks
4x faster development velocity, enabling rapid iteration and growth
The rebuild validated the strategic reset — Ember now had both a scalable app and a clear purpose driving feature expansion.
Lessons I Carried Forward
Testing more often, advocating harder for user needs, and challenging outdated legacy features would have unlocked even greater impact.
Continuous user testing matters — while staying one sprint ahead worked well, we could have gained even more by running lightweight tests after each sprint. This would have sharpened prioritisation decisions pre-launch.
Advocate for user needs, even when business priorities diverge — users clearly highlighted planning and reviews as missing pieces of the experience. I wanted to bring these into the sprints earlier, but the business prioritised overload solutions, rebranding, video feeds, and social feeds first. Balancing advocacy with pragmatism was a key learning.
Legacy features can restrict progress — the business held onto a gamification element from an earlier version of the app (a “spirit” avatar). We were asked to incorporate it into most flows, despite the fact that users struggled to see its relevance. This slowed progress and highlighted the importance of questioning what truly adds value.
