first date
UX Design
UI Design
Startup
AI Entertainment
Pickford AI's social storytelling platform is designed to make collaborative world-building simple, accessible, and creatively empowering. Their first environment First Date, is an early look into the vision for the future of human-computer interaction as a form of storytelling. Inspired by platforms like Fortnite, Roblox, and Character.ai, the web app's redesign had the goal of creating a clean entry point that highlights creativity while maintaining visual consistency across mobile and desktop.
year
2025
Role
UX Designer
UI Designer
Timeline
2 Months
tools used
Figma
Figma Make
Webflow
Overview
Problem
Pickford AI's early environment, First Date, lacked key features and required significant visual refinement to meet the platform's vision. The main challenge was designing the core experiences, specifically the Character Builder and Live Viewing screens. Over the course of the project I'd also need to design the web app's homepage that would act as the hub for users to navigate diverse experiences, characters, and shared clips from the res of the community.
Solution
We designed a fitness app that turns sweat directly into support. By converting daily steps and calories into small, measurable donations, we made charitable giving feel like an achievement rather than just a cost. This approach allows users to support global health initiatives through their regular routines, making impact feel completely effortless.
Process
designing the core
Given the short timeline the process focused on rapid prototyping and iteration drawing inspiration from gamified platforms rather than traditional user research. We prioritized building the core loop (phase 1) first before designing the ecosystem around it.
Working from product requirements and the existing platform iteration, I designed the Player Lobby, Character Builder, and Live Story screens. I sketched some low-fidelity wireframes to establish the information architecture for these primary flows, making sure it fit the vision before moving forward. Phase 1 concluded with the high-fidelity design of the Live Viewing Screen, giving the team a visual interpretation of being able to chat with friends while watch the experience in real-time.
Designing the ecosystem
With the core mechanics established, the focus shifted to the discovery layer. I designed the centralized Hub to aggregate Live Rooms, featured Clips, and community Stories, serving as the primary entry point for the experience. For this phase we started within Figma Make to iterate quickly, but due to its limitations we moved back to Design to build on what we had. New concepts were presented like a new way to customize character's personalities and appearances, so as new ideas were discussed, I'd go back to make some design changes to the past screens to maintain design cohesiveness.
Simultaneously, I helped out with the company blog, developing a Webflow CMS for the company. This implementation provided the communication team with a scalable system for content management while maintaining visual consistency between the marketing site and the application's evolving identity.
Solution
The finish line
The final design established a cohesive, end-to-end experience by defining the core user flows: content discovery, character creation, and live interaction. I designed the modular Lobby as the central discovery engine, which aggregates content like live rooms and clips into a streamlined feed. Simultaneously, with the vision the product manager provided, I redesigned the Character Creator's personality selector to be more in depth, including an alignment chart
This work delivered a complete, polished environment for First Date. Beyond the product, I implemented a Webflow CMS for the marketing site, providing the team with a scalable infrastructure to manage blog content and ensure visual consistency between the site and the web application.
Retrospective
A look back
Overall it was a busy couple of months that I wouldn't trade for anything else. The experience I had working with world-class professionals on a passion project with the funds to see it bloom was rewarding in ways I still struggle to describe. I would have loved to have conducted tests to validate our design ideas with a focus group, but that's just the nature of these agile projects.