Molehill Studio

Mobile App Design

  • Moleskine needed a social platform for their Smart Notebook users.

  • I developed an onboarding experience in order for like-minded users to connect with each other.

Team: Ivette Ferreras Spesia, Laura Guiral Cuervo, Opeyemi Fadiyimu, Vanessa Scales, Tally Ozegbe

Role: UX/UI Designer

Tools: Figma, Figma Make

Timeline: 2.5 week sprint

What do people use their notebook for?

First, we asked ourselves:

Notebooks hold inspiration - ideas, plans, sketches, goals.

Then, we asked users

What is the ideal online space?

Creatives want connection.

Meaningful, personal connection.

Through our user interviews, we learned that

Creatives have an impersonal experience on current platforms.

We summarized our users’ experiences by creating the persona “Bay”

The super talented creative that feels immensely uninspired every time she posts on Instagram.

Bay wants an online platform that sparks creativity,

offers collaborative communities, and lets her control what she sees.

  • Creative to her core

  • Can catch inspiration anywhere

  • Naturally private online

Behaviors:

Pain points from existing social media:

  • Pressure to post

  • Limited control over content

  • Unmoderated negative comments

We conducted market research and learned

A strong onboarding process is critical to a personalized feed.

So what makes a good onboarding process?

Visible progress bar

Easy control over profile visibility

Clear terms and conditions

Inviting splash page

Users control their feed

To create a unique online space for Moleskine users, we built

Molehill Studio

featuring a strong onboarding experience that builds connection and inspiration.

She’ll connect with like-minded creatives to share, comment, support and learn.

She controls who sees her content with customizable privacy settings, post visibility, and comments

What does this mean for Bay?

all through the familiarity of her Moleskine Smart Notebook.

The design process

After sketching, we came up with this basic outline

and after testing this

users said:

  • Details to type of creator page

  • Improved formatting

  • Skip options

  • Small app tour

So we added:

and after more testing

users said:

  • About page

  • Content preview

  • Condensed privacy and notifications page

So we added:

Mood board and branding

From here, we moved forward with

Lastly, we took our design to Figma Make

  • To rapidly prototype

  • Implement branding

  • Challenge ourselves to work with AI

What we learned

  • Figma Make’s speed let us test ideas quickly

  • AI works well when you know exactly what to ask for

  • Some interactions and complex features don’t fully translate outside the tool