Projects - The evolution of a dating app

The evolution of a dating app

Leading Inner Circle's premium rebrand

Client

Inner Circle - 2024/2025

Sector

Consumer app - Dating

Role

Product designer, UX research, strategy. Working closely with Brand marketing, and CEO.

The TLDR

After years of incremental refreshes, Inner Circle needed a bold visual transformation to support its strategic repositioning as a premium lifestyle-based dating app.
I led the in-app rebrand: re-designing the existing interface, rebuilding the design system from the ground up and translating the new brand identity into a distinctive editorial UI that specifically differentiated us from the typical dating app.

The challenge:
The existing design system had evolved through three previous refreshes and wasn't scalable as the design team grew. I needed to balance brand consistency with functional usability; implementing bold editorial typography and colors while ensuring the app remained intuitive. The biggest design tension: staying true to brand guidelines while making deliberate deviations (like using sans-serif for legibility) where usability demanded it.

The outcome:
Delivered a complete app rebrand (all new and existing UI and UX)
and rebuilt design system foundations, enabling the team to design new experiences in days versus weeks.

Design evolution

Background —

Inner Circle was undergoing a major strategic shift in 2024: repositioning as a premium app for connecting users through shared lifestyles rather than just photos and bios. The business needed a bold visual impact to match this new unique selling proposition.

Challenge —

While the existing app wasn't visually inconsistent, it did look similar to every other dating app and the underlying style guide had evolved through three previous brand refreshes and documentation lived primarily in my head; not scalable as the design team grew.

I co-managed the rebrand rollout with the Head of Brand over two months.
I was responsible for all things app: defining the user experience and interface, rebuilding the design system, and implementing the new brand identity seamlessly within the product. I worked primarily with the CEO, brand designer, and engineering team.

Approach —

With this rebrand, I saw an opportunity to start fresh: building a proper foundation system that would increase output speed, consistency, and collaboration.

Visual audit and foundation: I audited all existing screens to identify opportunities for streamlining. Similar components that could be consolidated, color and typography inconsistencies, and outdated patterns. Working with engineering, we moved color and typography tokens to the frontend to make future updates easier and remove backend bottlenecks.

Translating brand to UI: The biggest challenge was implementing the new typography and colors in a way that felt consistent with the editorial style, while maintaining usability. The brief was explicit: don't make it look like a typical dating app. We tested multiple mockup screens to find the right balance.
The editorial approach meant full-bleed imagery, bold "display" typography paired with serif fonts for headings, and strategic use of sans-serif for legibility.

Navigating stakeholder opinions: As design and taste can be quite subjective,
I navigated stakeholder relationships by presenting key UI decisions backed by data, industry standards, best practices and design principles.

Phased rollout strategy: We took a phased approach, launching core app screens (browse, message, match) emails and social rebrand first, along with updated typography, colors, and button shapes. Followed by the re-designed UI for discover, events, lifestyle matching and profile settings. The phased approach allowed us to launch earlier, and catch potential bugs and impact on metrics.

App screen audit Previous design "system" NEW UI for Home screens, activity screens, inital profiles

Results —

The rebrand successfully repositioned Inner Circle as a premium lifestyle-based dating app with a distinctive visual identity.

Internally, the reception was overwhelmingly positive; everyone was happy with the modern refresh. The new design system significantly reduced design time: initial concepts could be designed within days versus a full week previously.

The editorial UI successfully highlighted lifestyles and made them more prominent, supporting the product strategy from the earlier design sprint work.

Events/discover and in app alerts

Outcome —

Post-launch iteration: Based on early feedback and usage data, we refined the editorial-style profile images on the home page to show all of the user's lifestyles (not just one) and included a primary like button for clearer user action. This balanced the magazine-style aesthetic with conversion optimization.

Above: Profile on the home page and profile detail page higlighting lifestyles. New design system tokens

Takeaway —

By rebuilding from the ground up rather than applying another incremental refresh, we created a scalable system that reduced design time, supported team growth, and gave Inner Circle a distinctive premium identity that matched its strategic positioning.

When stakeholders have strong opinions, ground your decisions in data and principles, test when there's disagreement, and be willing to let the evidence speak for itself.

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