Case Study
COLOUR
From a founder's vision to a fundable MVP — leading product strategy and identity-driven design for a cross-continental pre-seed startup team.
From a founder's vision to a fundable MVP — leading product strategy and identity-driven design for a cross-continental pre-seed startup team.
Project Context
The founding team had already identified a business opportunity — an identity-driven social platform for niche culture communities — and drafted an initial PRD to support pre-seed fundraising, but there was no designer on the team yet.
I joined as the lead product designer to translate their vision into a validated, research-informed MVP: rebuilding the information architecture from their PRD, leading research, and driving design from strategy through to high-fidelity, investor-ready prototypes — within 6 weeks.
COLOUR is an identity-driven social platform that helps people discover niche communities through digital family identities, AI-generated personas, and shared cultural interests.
Instead of shallow interest tags, COLOUR organises users around 12 Digital Families — each a distinct cultural world — matched through an AI-powered onboarding ritual called the Unknown Egg.
Team · Cross-functional 15+
Duration
6 Weeks
May – Jun 2026
Stage
Pre-Seed MVP
Fundraising
Sprint Timeline
Research & Competitive Analysis
30 surveys, 5 user interviews, competitive landscape mapping across Instagram, TikTok, Discord, Reddit
Product Strategy & MVP Definition
COLOUR Framework, Digital Family concept, Taste Graph architecture, MVP scope with founders
UX Design & AI-Assisted Exploration
IA and layout drafts (GPT + Stitch), visual concept exploration (即梦), persona generation (GPT + image AI), hi-fi screens
Prototype Testing & Iteration
24 prototype tests, usability synthesis, design iteration based on findings
Developer Handoff & Investor Demo
Figma component documentation, handoff specs, investor demo prep for pre-seed fundraising
My Responsibilities
Beyond visual design, this is the work that moved COLOUR from a founder's idea to a fundable MVP.
Product Strategy
User Research
UX Design
Cross-functional Collaboration
01 — Align the Business Vision
When I joined, the team already had an initial PRD. My first responsibility was aligning business goals, user needs, and technical feasibility before any interface design began.
Business Goal
Validate whether an identity-first, family-based community model creates more belonging than interest-tag feeds — and prove it's fundable.
User Problem
Niche culture communities are content-rich but belonging-poor on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Discord, and Reddit.
Success Metrics
Onboarding completion, identity creation completion, and community join intent from prototype testing.
Stakeholders
UK-based founders, a 5-person engineering team, business & growth, and a design team split across China, UK, and US.
Technical Constraints
Build on an existing component library (Ant Design) to move fast, with design tokens ready for future Chinese localisation.
02 — Validate Assumptions
We validated founder assumptions before committing engineering resources.
Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Discord, and Reddit are content-rich but belonging-poor. Users can consume endless content but struggle to find people who share the same niche aesthetic, cultural identity, or creative sensibility.
Existing social platforms optimise for engagement metrics, not genuine connection. Interest tags are shallow. Algorithmic feeds prioritise viral content over cultural resonance.
This creates a systemic gap: niche culture communities are underserved by mainstream platforms, leading to fragmented identity expression and low-quality belonging.
The opportunity is clear — build a platform where identity is the entry point, not the afterthought.
User Research
We recruited participants across four target user groups: Creative Students, International Students, Niche Culture Communities, and Independent Creators.
Research focused on how people navigate identity expression, community discovery, and belonging in digital spaces.
Affinity Map — synthesised from 30 surveys and 5 user interviews
AI accelerated transcription and affinity clustering, allowing the team to focus on interpreting insights rather than manually organising notes.
Research Findings
Insight 01
People want to find their people.
Users don't just want content — they want to feel seen by others who share the same cultural wavelength.
Insight 02
Identity matters more than content.
The desire to express who you are — aesthetically, culturally, creatively — drives community attachment more than content quality.
Insight 03
Users want low-pressure social interactions.
The anxiety of cold social spaces is a major barrier. Users need gentler, more contextual entry points into community.
User Personas
Based on research synthesis, we identified two primary user archetypes that represent the core needs of COLOUR's target audience — niche culture enthusiasts who are underserved by mainstream social platforms.
User Journey Map
The journey map traces the emotional arc of a new user across six stages — from discovering COLOUR to becoming an active community member. It surfaces pain points at each touchpoint and identifies key design opportunities that directly shaped our product decisions.
User Journey Map — 6 stages from discovery to long-term engagement
03 — Define Product Strategy
This is where research, business constraints, and feasibility converged into a single, fundable MVP scope.
The COLOUR Framework
Instead of interest tags, we designed a Taste Graph — a dynamic identity layer that maps cultural preferences, aesthetic sensibilities, and community behaviour into a coherent digital identity.
This flows through the product in three layers: Digital Family Identity → Squad Belonging → Meaningful Relationships.
Onboarding → Identity Creation → Recommendation → Community → Relationship
SWOT
Before locking the MVP scope, we assessed the strategy against our real conditions as a pre-seed, mostly part-time, three-market team — to make sure the direction was one we could actually execute in 6 weeks, not just one we liked.
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
Decision: given the part-time, cross-time-zone team and lack of validated data, we prioritised the fastest path to a testable core loop — English-first, UK-first — over building every feature founders had originally envisioned.
Prioritization Matrix
Instead of ranking features in isolation, we mapped each research insight against priority and feasibility for a 6-week MVP.
High Priority · High Feasibility
High Priority · Medium Feasibility
Medium Priority · Lower Feasibility
Low Priority · Low Feasibility (for MVP)
MVP Scope
Build Now
Future Roadmap
04 — Interaction & Visual Design
We mapped seven core user flows to ensure every interaction path was intentional — from new user onboarding and content discovery, to community joining, post creation, and account management. Edge cases and error states were defined at each decision point, and reviewed weekly with founders and engineers before moving to visuals.
12 Digital Families
The core of COLOUR's differentiation is the Digital Family system — 12 distinct cultural worlds, each with its own visual language, identity artefacts, and community culture. Users belong to a Family, not just a category.
The Unknown Egg
Onboarding is designed as an identity ritual, not a registration flow. Users begin as an Unknown Egg — undefined, full of potential. Through a series of choices, the egg absorbs Family Light and transforms. AI then generates a unique Digital Persona based on the user's selections.
Unknown Egg
Family Light
Generation
Digital Persona
Once the interaction logic was finalised, I used AI to rapidly explore multiple visual directions before refining the selected concept into production-ready interfaces.
Onboarding Experience
The onboarding flow feels like an identity ritual — reducing the anxiety of joining a new social space by making the first experience about discovery and self-expression.
Home & Community
The home feed is powered by the Taste Graph — surfacing content by cultural alignment, not just engagement metrics.
Create, Notify & Profile
Content creation is a relationship trigger — posts, events, and interactions are structured to facilitate real connections within Families and Squads.
05 — Testing & Handoff
We tested the prototype with 24 participants across target user groups. Results validated the core design decisions — particularly the identity-first onboarding and Family discovery mechanism.
AI helped cluster usability feedback into recurring themes, so iteration time went into fixing the right issues first.
Outcomes
MVP Completed — Full design system, all core flows, developer handoff delivered within 6-week sprint.
Investor Demo Ready — Interactive prototype prepared for pre-seed fundraising presentations.
Pre-Seed Support — Design artefacts directly contributed to investor pitch materials.
Reflection
This project pushed me to think beyond UI — to design a cultural product where identity, belonging, and AI capability are inseparable.
The biggest learning: when you give users a meaningful identity framework first, the rest of the experience becomes intuitive. People don't need to be taught how to belong — they need the right context.
Engineering Collaboration
Collaboration with engineering wasn't an afterthought — it was embedded throughout the sprint. To accelerate development velocity, I recommended adopting Ant Design as the base component library, with custom theming and component overrides to align with COLOUR's visual identity — reducing front-end build time while maintaining design consistency. Weekly syncs with frontend and backend teams ensured every design decision was technically grounded and implementation-ready.
Ran weekly design reviews with founders, frontend engineers, and backend engineers to align on scope, surface technical constraints early, and iterate fast.
Delivered complete Figma component documentation with spacing, states, and interaction specs — reducing back-and-forth with engineering by eliminating ambiguity.
Conducted 3 dedicated feasibility review sessions with frontend engineers before finalising the AI Identity Creation flow and Family Ecosystem screens.
Worked across a team of 2 frontend and 2 backend engineers, plus 1 part-time engineer overseeing code quality — bridging design intent and technical execution across web and mobile platforms.