Projects
Design + Marketing internship for an early-stage startup
I led an end-to-end UI/UX redesign to differentiate Wine Find in a crowded wine-app market and introduce a new social feature. I prioritized whitespace and elegance to reduce visual density and make complex wine information feel lighter and more breathable while still supporting depth, discovery, and social interaction.
UX/UI Designer
Marketing
1 designer (me)
1-2 engineers
2 founders
Figma
Adobe Premiere Pro
Social Media Marketing
Apple Ads
Wine Find needed to serve two overlapping audiences:
Primary users: 30+ wine enthusiasts who view wine as a lifestyle hobby
Secondary users: 21+ professionals who want to start learning about wine but feel overwhelmed by the information
Key insights
Users in this space expect quality, authenticity, aesthetics, community, and discovery
I also conducted light competitor analysis across major wine apps.
Many existing wine apps feel:
Visually outdated
Dense and overwhelming
Inaccurate or unintuitive
The biggest opportunity for differentiation was:
UI as first impression — making the app feel aspirational and premium
UX clarity — allowing users to actually discover the app’s strong functionality
This led me to focus first on building a sleek visual system and a clearer information hierarchy to reduce cognitive load and encourage exploration.
Based on the research, we decided that the app should focus on accomplishing the following:
Make dense wine information feel easy and enjoyable to explore
Create a premium, memorable experience that reflects wine as a lifestyle hobby
Clarify navigation and page purpose, especially after introducing social features
The app added a new friends/social feature, but the existing layout wasn’t built to support it cleanly.
I redesigned and restructured:
Home / Feed page
Introduced a social feed
Created a clear entry point for discovery
Navigation hierarchy
Gave each page a single, focused job
Reduced confusion between sections
Clear page roles reduced friction and helped users understand where to go for social content, personal content, and wine discovery.
One of my primary responsibilities was redesigning the app interface. I wanted it to have a distinct look and feel, but also to have the information on the app be intuitive to navigate. To do this, I made the following design decisions:
Wine detail pages were dense and felt more like a spreadsheet than a lifestyle product.
I redesigned the wine detail page to:
Use visual grouping for related information
Introduce hierarchy through layout and spacing
Create a more editorial, premium feel
The app displayed large amounts of wine data, which could be overwhelming for new users.
I intentionally prioritized:
Larger Spacing
Thinner typography
This made dense information feel lighter, more scannable, and more approachable without sacrificing depth.
User reviews (aka notes) allowed image uploads, which introduced visual chaos and risked breaking the premium look.
To fix this, I…
Simplified the notes UI into a neutral black-and-white system
Let user images take visual priority
Minimized color clashes and visual noise
Tradeoff: This section became more minimal than other parts of the app, but it preserved cohesion and scalability.
The final redesign delivered:
A new social home/feed experience
A restructured navigation system
A redesigned wine detail page with improved hierarchy
A cleaner, more readable profile page
A cohesive visual system grounded in whitespace and elegance
Together, these changes created a more premium, intuitive, and discoverable experience without requiring a full technical overhaul.
What I learned
How to use whitespace and hierarchy to reduce cognitive load
How to design visual systems that survive user-generated content
How to balance brand ambition with real-world engineering constraints
