Voodies Connect
Role:
Product Design Intern
Timeline:
May 2025 - Aug 2025
Team:
Product, Engineering, UX Research
Context
I joined Voodies as a Product Design Intern and took ownership of Voodies Connect, an in-progress collaboration feature for restaurants and creators.
I was responsible for:
Refining and stabilizing existing collaboration workflows
Designing feature extensions to support end-to-end use cases
Ensuring consistency within a growing product and evolving design system
The Design Challenge
The challenge wasn’t adding features. It was making a complex, multi-step collaboration flow usable, trustworthy, and efficient for two very different user groups.
Many restaurant owners were not tech-savvy and unfamiliar with creator terminology
Creators needed speed and flexibility, not rigid processes
The experience needed clear guidance without excessive clicks
Consistency mattered across a product where designers owned features independently
Making Sense of the Feature
With limited documentation, the first step was to reverse-engineer the feature and understand its intended role within the broader product.
Audited existing flows to understand original intent
Identified assumptions, unclear decision points, and friction
Surfaced gaps across onboarding, discovery, campaign creation, and collaboration
After auditing the existing flows, I partnered closely with engineering and UX research to validate assumptions and refine decisions before moving into high-fidelity design.
Collaboration with engineering helped clarify feasibility, constraints, and edge cases to ensure proposed changes aligned with existing systems.
In parallel, collaboration with the UX research team through A/B tests and surveys surfaced specific experience gaps:
Missing and incomplete food preference categories
No clear way to skip or defer steps during restaurant onboarding
These insights helped prioritize where additional structure was needed versus where flexibility was more important before finalizing design changes.
Key Design Changes
Preview before campaign submission
Auditing the campaign creation flow revealed a critical gap: restaurants were asked to publish campaigns without visibility into how their content would appear to creators.
A preview mode was added during campaign creation, allowing restaurants to review campaigns exactly as creators would see them before submitting or publishing.
Restructuring Restaurant Onboarding
Reviewing the onboarding flow revealed that key profile information was missing, leading to gaps between onboarding and downstream usage.
Restaurant onboarding was restructured to clearly surface required information while keeping completion lightweight and low-friction.
Enabling structured campaign collaboration
The audit also surfaced a structural inefficiency: creators had no direct way to apply to campaigns, leading to repetitive manual outreach.
A campaign application and collaboration flow was introduced, allowing creators to apply directly and centralizing collaboration within the product.
Designing Within a Moving System
Voodies Connect was designed alongside an evolving design system.
Throughout the project, I:
Adapted feature designs to newly introduced components and patterns
Fed real product requirements back into the design system
Maintained consistency across independently owned product surfaces
This required designing beyond a single feature and accounting for the product as a whole.
Although the feature was still in development when my internship ended, the final designs:
Improved clarity and confidence during restaurant onboarding
Reduced uncertainty in campaign creation and collaboration workflows
Balanced structured guidance for restaurants with flexibility for creators
Remained consistent with an evolving design system and broader product patterns
Key Takeaways
This project reinforced my ability to:
Design effectively without complete context
Take ownership of inherited work and make it clearer and more cohesive
Balance user needs with system and organizational constraints
Collaborate across research, product, engineering, and design systems
Core takeaway: I can design through ambiguity without breaking systems.