I love it

Company: i love it
Brand: Early-stage startup
Role: Head of Product Design UX/UI

- Creative Strategy
- Product Design UX/UI
- User Reseach

Project Overview

As Head of Product Design, I led the end-to-end UX/UI strategy for "i love it" an early-stage social commerce startup, shaping both the product experience and brand identity during a critical growth phase. My focus was on increasing user adoption, engagement, and retention by identifying friction points across key customer journeys and designing experiences that encouraged discovery, participation, and conversion.

Through extensive user research, customer interviews, and behavioural analysis, I developed a deep understanding of user needs, motivations, and barriers to adoption. These insights informed a comprehensive redesign of the platform, resulting in a complete UX/UI overhaul and the creation of a scalable design system that enabled faster product iteration and consistency across touchpoints.

The objective was to create an intuitive, accessible, and visually distinctive product that not only improved conversion rates but also strengthened long-term user loyalty and platform growth.

Social shopping powered by real recommendations

i love it is a social commerce app that puts real people’s product recommendations at the centre of shopping.

It combines AI curation with user-generated video and image posts, so people discover products through trusted recommendations rather than traditional ads. When users share products they love, they earn commissions—turning everyday recommendations into income.

The platform shifts commerce towards authenticity and community, helping people find products they’re more likely to enjoy while also reducing returns and waste. It also creates a new way for users to earn from something they already do: sharing what they love.

Discovery & Product-Market Fit

Through customer journey audits, user research, and interviews, we identified a key challenge: users did not clearly understand the platform's value proposition. Both creators and shoppers struggled to see how the product differed from existing social and e-commerce platforms, creating friction during activation and limiting adoption.

These insights highlighted a product-market fit challenge, where the product's core value was not being effectively communicated to its target audiences.

Defining the Narrative

Our research showed that the App Store listing and onboarding experience were failing to communicate the platform's purpose, value, and unique offering. As the first touchpoints for new users, they represented a significant opportunity to improve conversion.

Behavioural data and user feedback also revealed that the onboarding journey was unnecessarily long and introduced friction at a critical stage of the funnel. Users were being asked to provide information that was not essential for initial account creation, increasing drop-off rates and negatively impacting sign-up completion.

Simplifying onboarding to accelerate adoption

To address this, we streamlined the onboarding flow, reduced the number of required steps, and focused on capturing only the information needed to get users to value as quickly as possible.

This helped clarify the platform's value from the outset and laid the foundation for improved adoption, engagement, and conversion.

The Shopper Journey

Focusing on the “Shopper” persona, we mapped the early-stage journey from discovery through creator-led UGC content to app engagement. This revealed a fragmented experience, where users were often inspired by creator posts but dropped off before reaching meaningful product exploration or purchase intent.

Simplifying the user journey

to drive engagement

We improved adoption and retention by reducing friction across the experience. Core user flows were simplified on both desktop and mobile, UX copy was refined to better guide users, and UI patterns were redesigned to make product discovery easier and more intuitive.

We also encouraged users to explore and follow more creators to strengthen ongoing engagement.
The result is a smoother experience that connects inspiration to purchase more directly, helping users move more confidently from discovery to action.

The Sharer Journey

Focusing on the primary persona, the “Sharer” (creators who generate and publish product recommendations). We conducted in-depth user interviews to understand their motivations, behaviours, and success drivers. The goal was to identify how the platform could better support their ability to create and share content efficiently, while maximising the impact of their recommendations.

Reducing Friction in the Creator Funnel

Insights from user interviews and behavioural data analysis allowed us to prioritise the parts of the experience that directly supported content creation and sharing.

We focused on identifying where creators were dropping off or slowing down, and reworked key workflows to remove unnecessary steps and complexity.

Driving Creator Funnel Conversion & Output

The result a simplified creator journey, with refined UX and improved information architecture that made it faster and more intuitive to post and distribute product recommendations.

The primary objective was to improve conversion within the creator funnel—ensuring more users successfully created and shared content—while increasing overall platform activity and driving stronger downstream engagement from shoppers.