Circle

A private social app for close friend groups — designed and coded end-to-end using AI tools.

Product launch coming soon

Circle groups screen for browsing and joining circles

Role:: Product Designer
Duration:: In progress
Contribution:: Product design, AI-assisted development
Platform:: iOS

Keeping up with friends' lives is hard. Social media only shows the highlight reel — the curated, high-level version of what people want you to see, not what's actually going on with them.

Circle is built to help small groups of close friends get deeper with each other and stay genuinely up to date, especially the friends who live far away. A weekly prompt gets everyone posting, and posts stay blurred until you share your own — so everyone shows up before anyone gets to scroll.

Research

Research is in progress — findings will be added here once testing wraps.

Approach

After landing on the problem, I sketched out possible solutions — the features I'd want to see in an app like this — before moving into high-fidelity design.

Onboarding flow

First-time setup: tell the app about yourself, create your first group, set how often the crew should post, then land in the app ready to go.

Onboarding: how often should the crew post

Onboarding: you've created your first group

The product

Feature 1: Post to reveal

Everyone's check-in stays blurred until you post your own — you have to share before you get to see what the rest of the circle has been up to. It keeps things honest and makes sure everyone shows up, instead of a few people posting for the whole group to lurk on.

Locked

Circle feed with posts still blurred, prompting the user to post

Unlocked

Revealed

Feature 2: Write from prompts

A prompt gets the crew's ideas going, but posting isn't limited to text — members can write, attach photos, record a voice note, drop in a GIF, or run a poll for the group. Once someone posts, they can nudge the rest of the circle to share their own update too.

Choose a prompt

Composer with a chosen prompt, ready to write

Write & attach

Composer with written update and an attached photo

Nudge the crew

After posting, the option to nudge the rest of the circle

Feature 3: Join or create a circle

Circle isn't just for one friend group — users can browse and join existing circle communities or start their own. Communities can be anything from a book club or a workout crew to an everyday-inspiration circle.

Discovery screen for browsing and joining circles

Results

[Placeholder — add launch status, metrics, or outcomes once available.]

Assistance of AI

How AI helped me build this product from start to finish.

Exploration

AI helped me ideate and explore potential ideas — both the ones I already had and new directions AI surfaced based on the problem I was trying to solve.

Wireframe

AI assisted with the initial low-fidelity wireframes, giving me a solid starting point to design from.

Design & build

I designed the essential screens — onboarding flow, writing a post, the main feed, accounts — then gave them to Claude Code to build. I've been QAing the experience ever since.