CONTEXT
Supwell is a running community app — shoe tracking, social feed, and a peer-to-peer marketplace for used running gear. Pre-launch, with an active beta community and a founder building in public.
THE PROBLEM
Nobody could name what was wrong. The founder knew something felt off. A pre-recorded demo was already in the can.
The real issue: every screen had been designed in isolation. The nav labels changed between pages. Card treatments were inconsistent. The app was trying to be four products simultaneously — marketplace, social feed, training log, shoe tracker — with no hierarchy between them. It didn't need polish. It needed an editorial decision about what mattered most on each screen.
THE INTERVENTION
I wrote a precise UX brief that diagnosed specific issues with coherence, named the hierarchy problem explicitly, and proposed a clear information architecture for each screen.
WHAT HAPPENED
The engineer applied the redesign. The founder cut the broken demo segment from a pre-recorded video rather than showcase the old design. The fix was accurate enough that Yowana described the result without prompting.
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WHAT THIS SHOWS
New user empathy catches what specialists miss. The people closest to a product stop seeing what a first-time user experiences. Naming the problem precisely — not just flagging that something feels wrong — is what turns feedback into action.