“Make social media better” is not a problem statement

A brief you can’t design against

The client wanted a new social media experience. That’s a direction, not a problem — you can’t design against “better,” and every feature idea sounds equally reasonable when nothing has been ruled out.

One piece of signal narrowed it. Daily active users across the major platforms were still climbing while engagement drifted down. More people watching, fewer people making. So the kick-off question became:

How might we encourage people to actively participate in a social media app?

That’s answerable. “Better” isn’t.

Where the gap was

I ran a competitive teardown of TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat across four dimensions: content creation, fun, interaction, and reward system. The team collected screen recordings and annotations; I summarised the whole thing into a single table so the landscape could be read at a glance instead of argued about from memory.

Three of the four columns were crowded. Everyone had solved content creation, everyone had a take on fun, everyone had interaction patterns. The reward column was nearly empty. TikTok’s Creator Fund was limited to a few countries, YouTube required a minimum subscriber count, Instagram and Snapchat had nothing generally available. Getting paid to create was something that happened to people who were already successful.

Three concepts, and the one that didn’t exist yet

Ideation ran through Crazy Eights, then narrowed to three: challenges in a bingo structure (A), a continuous short story built from images (B), and continuous comic strips people draw themselves (C).

We tested all three with six participants — three creators, three consumers — showing each concept in turn and probing two things: would you actually participate, and what reward would make you want to?

Affinity mapping the responses produced two findings, and both changed the product.

The concepts weren’t mutually exclusive

A tested strongest on versatility. B was interesting but narrower. C demanded drawing ability, which cut its audience sharply. Rather than picking a winner, we combined A’s challenge structure with B’s continuous story — the concept we shipped was a fourth one that didn’t exist before testing.

Money was not the top motivator

The obvious assumption going in was that cash is the reward. Participants said real money would be nice, but that achievements, in-app currency and physical goods mattered more — what kept them motivated was recognition and progress, with money as one expression of it. That reframed the reward system from a payout mechanism into a motivation system, which is a different product.

From wires to a working prototype

Moodboard. I ran this deliverable myself — collected references, grouped them by feel, filtered down to four named directions. The team chose Clean, Simple, Modern, for a specific reason rather than taste: the content in this app is the users’ stories, so the interface had to recede. A busier visual system would have competed with the thing it exists to display.

Prototype. Built in Protopie rather than Figma, because the interactions we’d designed weren’t achievable in Figma. It was my second time using the tool and I prototyped most of the user flow in it — needed both for realistic testing and so developers could see how the trickier interactions were meant to behave.

What the testing changed

Five participants — three creators, two consumers — across five scenarios. Twenty-five task attempts, three of which hit trouble. Most people completed everything quickly.

A high pass rate is a weak finding on its own, so the follow-up questions did the real work. Four things came back and were fixed: story information architecture, profile screen emphasis, iconography clarity, and general visual polish. The first is worth showing properly.

Current stories were in the wrong place

We’d put “My Current Stories” on Discover, alongside categories and trending — the logic being that these are all ways of filtering stories.

Testing said otherwise. People read current stories as stories they had taken part in, which makes them part of their identity rather than part of a browse surface. Several also couldn’t distinguish “current” from “joined.”

So we consolidated current and joined into one place on the profile, and used chips to distinguish ongoing from completed. That removed the confusion — and had a second effect we hadn’t planned: with the current-stories block gone from Discover, Trending Stories moved above the fold, which increased its visibility and the interaction it got.

What shipped, and what happened next

Addee shipped to the App Store under TRIS Inc. The listing is still live: “Start an epic story and let your friends continue with what happens next.”

What I’d do differently

The whole product rests on compensation changing how people behave, and we never really tested that. We asked people whether rewards would motivate them and they said yes, which isn’t the same thing as watching it work. That’s the assumption I’d go after first now.

We also spent most of our time on earning the reward and not much on receiving it. The withdrawal flow was underdesigned, and that’s the point where the promise either holds or doesn’t.

And for a product that’s collaborative by definition, most of the flows we built still move one person at a time. I’d push harder on that now.