Intro
Cat Board is an end-to-end platform designed for amateur writers to share their works-in-progress, receive constructive feedback, and support others through peer critique. The platform also fosters connection through a built-in community feature, helping writers find encouragement, accountability, and creative alignment.
Writing is often an isolating and uncertain process, filled with creative, emotional, and structural challenges. Cat Board exists to identify these obstacles and remove them—so writers can focus on bringing their stories to life.
Generated with AI
My Role
Project Overview
5 weeks
Through UX/UI Academy
Tools
Sketchbook and paper
Zoom and Maze
Figma
Resources
Sketchbook and paper
Zoom and Maze
Figma
End-to-End Design
Flows
Sketches
Wireframing
Prototyping
Mid-fidelity
Hi-Fidelity
Final product
Research
Competitive Analysis
Usability test scripts
User interviews
User testing
Analyzing feedback
Prioritizing features
My Role as a UX Designer
My Role
My Role as a UX Designer
Research: Competitive Analysis - Usability scripts - User interviews - User testing - Analyzing feedback - Prioritizing features
End-to-End Design: Flows - Sketches - Wireframing - Prototyping - Mid-fidelity - Hi-Fidelity - Final product
Project Overview
5 weeks
Through UX/UI Academy
Tools
Sketchbook and paper
Zoom and Maze
Figma
Resources
Group critiques
Mentor Feedback
Project Overview
5 weeks
Through UX/UI Academy
Tools
Sketchbook and paper
Zoom and Maze
Figma
Resources
Group critiques
Mentor Feedback
My Role as a UX Designer
Research: Competitive Analysis - Usability scripts - User interviews - User testing - Analyzing feedback - Prioritizing features
End-to-End Design: Flows - Sketches - Wireframing - Prototyping - Mid-fidelity - Hi-Fidelity - Final product
Research
Generated with AI
Turn the Competition Into Your Backstory
I viewed four competitors: Scribophile, Critique Circle, qtCircle, and WriteSeen
Strengths
The use of a point system to motivate users to give others feedback on their writing projects
Able to choose preferences of writing projects users would prefer to give feedback on
Pen name
Simplistic layouts
I viewed four competitors: Scribophile, Critique Circle, qtCircle, and WriteSeen
Strengths
The use of a point system to motivate users to give others feedback on their writing projects
Able to choose preferences of writing projects users would prefer to give feedback on
Pen name
Simplistic layouts
Weaknesses
Point system taken advantage of
Scribophile takes a while to learn, not intuitive
Lack of personality
Weaknesses
Point system taken advantage of
Scribophile takes a while to learn, not intuitive
Lack of personality
Turn the Competition Into Your Backstory
Generated with AI
Research
Generated with AI
Step Into Their Stories
I interviewed four amateur writers—ranging from casual hobbyists to one with professional publishing experience—who wrote across formats including stories, poems, songs, blogs, and articles. Despite their different backgrounds and goals, they shared the same core challenges.
Having a community helped my users overcome:
Sharing their work with others increased motivation
Collaborating with peers kept them to stay accountable and on track
Working with others made writing more enjoyable
Provided access to meaningful feedback they struggled to find elsewhere
Seeing others share unfinished work also reduced fear and boosted confidence when posting their own projects
Valued having a dedicated space to ask writing-related questions and learn from peers
Time was a major constraint for every participant. While the app couldn’t create more hours in their day, it needed to respect their limited time by being intuitive, fast to learn, and easy to use.
All interviewees also expressed strong interest in being able to upload images alongside their writing, using visuals to add context, inspiration, or emotional depth to their projects.
Step Into Their Stories
I interviewed four amateur writers—ranging from casual hobbyists to one with professional publishing experience—who wrote across formats including stories, poems, songs, blogs, and articles. Despite their different backgrounds and goals, they shared the same core challenges.
Having a community helped my users overcome:
Sharing their work with others increased motivation
Collaborating with peers kept them to stay accountable and on track
Working with others made writing more enjoyable
Provided access to meaningful feedback they struggled to find elsewhere
Seeing others share unfinished work also reduced fear and boosted confidence when posting their own projects
Valued having a dedicated space to ask writing-related questions and learn from peers
Time was a major constraint for every participant. While the app couldn’t create more hours in their day, it needed to respect their limited time by being intuitive, fast to learn, and easy to use.
All interviewees also expressed strong interest in being able to upload images alongside their writing, using visuals to add context, inspiration, or emotional depth to their projects.
Cat Board is an end-to-end platform designed for amateur writers to share their works-in-progress, receive constructive feedback, and support others through peer critique. The platform also fosters connection through a built-in community feature, helping writers find encouragement, accountability, and creative alignment.
Writing is often an isolating and uncertain process, filled with creative, emotional, and structural challenges. Cat Board exists to identify these obstacles and remove them—so writers can focus on bringing their stories to life.
Generated with AI
Intro
Define
Wrestling With Motivation, Page by Page
The following features were prioritized:
Feature for sharing stories, giving and receiving writing projects
Forum feature: to give amateur writers a way to ask each other writing related questions and provide advice
Messages: users able to connect with other writers on a more personal level, providing them a chance to have a writing partner
Cover images: users stated that they liked being able to add pictures to their writing projects, to add to the add visual appeal
These features were chosen to support amateur writers in being able to connect and help each other grow as they work on their writing projects.
Your Stories, Our Mission
Supportive collaboration
To support writer growth, the platform prioritizes connection and communication through community features such as messaging, forums, writer connections, and peer feedback.
Generated with AI
Generated with AI
Integrity
Building on supportive collaboration, the second brand value focuses on integrity in feedback. A points-based system encourages users to provide thoughtful, constructive reviews, fostering trust across the platform.
Inviting and Friendly
Cat Board is designed with a warm, approachable personality intended to feel inviting and charming to its users. This personality is expressed through thoughtful color choices, visual styling, and a cohesive theme. Typography was selected to balance warmth and approachability with clarity and legibility, ensuring the interface feels welcoming without sacrificing usability.
Imaginative and Innovative
Cat Board features a creative, distinctive identity built around a cats-and-keyboards theme, inspired by the familiar habit of cats sitting on keyboards while people write. This motif informed the app’s name, logo, and genre icons, creating a cohesive and memorable brand.
Beyond visuals, Cat Board focuses on innovation in user motivation by exploring new ways to encourage thoughtful, high-quality feedback—helping the platform stand apart from competitors while strengthening community trust.
Plotting the Journey
I made four main flows
Signing Up Flow: making an account, choosing preferences for the types of writing projects
Giving feedback on other users' writing projects
Posting their own writing project
Messaging a fellow writer
Design
Design Choices That Drive the User Story
With clear priorities and flows established, I began by sketching screen layouts and user flows on paper to quickly explore structure and interaction. Once the flows were validated, I translated the sketches into Figma and created usable prototypes for the primary user journeys. I then conducted unmoderated usability testing to evaluate whether the flows were intuitive and to gather additional user feedback. Based on these insights, I iterated through low-, mid-, and high-fidelity designs, refining the experience at each stage.
Testing
Polishing the Pages
I conducted moderated user testing over Zoom video calls with the same users. The test was for these flows: The signing up flows, giving feedback, receiving feedback, and checking messages.
I conducted moderated usability testing over Zoom to evaluate three primary flows: Signing Up, Giving Feedback, Posting Story, and Checking Messages. Participants were also encouraged to explore the full end-to-end app and provide additional feedback.
The study included four amateur writers—ranging from casual hobbyists to one with professional publishing experience—who wrote across formats including stories, poems, songs, blogs, and articles.. Overall feedback was highly positive, with a 100% task completion rate across all flows. Each task was completed in under one minutes, indicating that the experience was efficient and easy to navigate.
The most significant design changes, along with the rationale behind them, are outlined below.
Bottom Nav Bar
I redesigned the bottom navigation to reduce confusion around messaging. Users were unsure whether to look for messages under Community or Notifications, so I removed the notifications tab entirely and instead added contextual notification badges directly to relevant nav items. Messages from friends now appear on the Community icon, while feedback on stories surfaces on the My Stories icon, making notifications clearer and more intuitive.
Improving Button Experience
I added back buttons to multi-step screens, allowing users to recover from mistakes without restarting a flow.
I increased visual differentiation between primary and secondary buttons. This helped users more easily identify key actions, improving clarity and reducing hesitation during decision-making.
Story Cover Screens
Users were confused by having both “Next” and “Continue” buttons, unsure whether the actions were different, the interaction felt redundant. To resolve this, I removed the “Next” button and retained a single, clear “Continue” action.
This change also reduced visual clutter, allowing the cover image to feel more focused and intentional.
Additionally, I introduced the ability to like a piece after finishing it, creating a more natural moment for engagement at the end of the reading experience.
Feedback Summary Screen
I differentiated the “Add Feedback” and “Edit Feedback” states, by reducing the size of the edit feedback field and applied a bolder outline, making it immediately clear when a user was editing existing feedback versus writing new feedback.
I also added the sentence that the user commented on directly above the feedback field. This ensured that when users returned to edit their feedback, they retained clear context about what the comment referred to, reducing confusion and improving accuracy.
I conducted moderated user testing over Zoom video calls with the same users. The test was for these flows: The signing up flows, giving feedback, receiving feedback, and checking messages.
I conducted moderated usability testing over Zoom to evaluate three primary flows: Signing Up, Giving Feedback, Posting Story, and Checking Messages. Participants were also encouraged to explore the full end-to-end app and provide additional feedback.
The study included four amateur writers—ranging from casual hobbyists to one with professional publishing experience—who wrote across formats including stories, poems, songs, blogs, and articles.. Overall feedback was highly positive, with a 100% task completion rate across all flows. Each task was completed in under one minutes, indicating that the experience was efficient and easy to navigate.
The most significant design changes, along with the rationale behind them, are outlined below.
Polishing the Pages
Testing
Final Product
Clear Purpose & Intuitive Navigation
Users immediately understood the purpose of the app and felt confident navigating the flows. The concept resonated quickly and clearly.
Memorable Visual Design
The visual design made a strong impression. The cats-and-keyboards theme felt memorable and charming, supported by warm, bookish colors and a clean, uncluttered layout. Custom cat genre icons were a standout detail—one user noted, “I love the cat icons, I can’t believe you made them.”
Engaging Posting & Feedback Tools
Posting and feedback features kept users engaged. Cover images added personality to writing projects, the AI-generated cover option sparked excitement, and project preference settings gave users greater control over how their work was shared and reviewed.
Strong Community Connection
Community features proved especially compelling. Users enjoyed friending and messaging other writers and found the forums valuable for asking questions, exchanging insights, and staying connected.
Clear Purpose & Intuitive Navigation
Users immediately understood the purpose of the app and felt confident navigating the flows. The concept resonated quickly and clearly.
Memorable Visual Design
The visual design made a strong impression. The cats-and-keyboards theme felt memorable and charming, supported by warm, bookish colors and a clean, uncluttered layout. Custom cat genre icons were a standout detail—one user noted, “I love the cat icons, I can’t believe you made them.”
Engaging Posting & Feedback Tools
Posting and feedback features kept users engaged. Cover images added personality to writing projects, the AI-generated cover option sparked excitement, and project preference settings gave users greater control over how their work was shared and reviewed.
Strong Community Connection
Community features proved especially compelling. Users enjoyed friending and messaging other writers and found the forums valuable for asking questions, exchanging insights, and staying connected.
Conclusion
Every Story Needs a Purpose
I enjoyed designing an app with a purpose that felt personally meaningful. Writing is one of my favorite hobbies, as well as my husband’s, and it’s a way we connect. I hope Cat Board helps other writers build similar connections while moving closer to sharing their stories with the world.
This project also marked meaningful growth in my design practice. Increased confidence allowed me to work more efficiently and with less stress, avoiding mistakes I had encountered in earlier projects. With fewer roadblocks, I was able to focus more time on refinement—ensuring the experience worked smoothly and felt visually cohesive—rather than troubleshooting preventable issues.
Every Story Needs a Purpose
Conclusion
Final Product
Clear Purpose & Intuitive Navigation
Users immediately understood the purpose of the app and felt confident navigating the flows. The concept resonated quickly and clearly.
Memorable Visual Design
The visual design made a strong impression. The cats-and-keyboards theme felt memorable and charming, supported by warm, bookish colors and a clean, uncluttered layout. Custom cat genre icons were a standout detail—one user noted, “I love the cat icons, I can’t believe you made them.”
Engaging Posting & Feedback Tools
Posting and feedback features kept users engaged. Cover images added personality to writing projects, the AI-generated cover option sparked excitement, and project preference settings gave users greater control over how their work was shared and reviewed.
Strong Community Connection
Community features proved especially compelling. Users enjoyed friending and messaging other writers and found the forums valuable for asking questions, exchanging insights, and staying connected.
Conclusion
I enjoyed designing an app with a purpose that felt personally meaningful. Writing is one of my favorite hobbies, as well as my husband’s, and it’s a way we connect. I hope Cat Board helps other writers build similar connections while moving closer to sharing their stories with the world.
This project also marked meaningful growth in my design practice. Increased confidence allowed me to work more efficiently and with less stress, avoiding mistakes I had encountered in earlier projects. With fewer roadblocks, I was able to focus more time on refinement—ensuring the experience worked smoothly and felt visually cohesive—rather than troubleshooting preventable issues.
Every Story Needs a Purpose
Design
Now that I knew what to focus on I sketched out the layouts of screens and the flows on paper.
Once I was satisfied I moved the sketches into Figma and made the main flows useable. I conducted unmoderated user testing to see if the flows made sense, and if there was any other pieces if feedback my users would give me. Once I received the feedback I moved from low-fidelity, to mid, to high fidelity.
Polishing the Pages
Define
Supportive collaboration
To support writer growth, the platform prioritizes connection and communication through community features such as messaging, forums, writer connections, and peer feedback.
Your Stories, Our Mission
Generated with AI
Integrity
Building on supportive collaboration, the second brand value focuses on integrity in feedback. A points-based system encourages users to provide thoughtful, constructive reviews, fostering trust across the platform.
Generated with AI
Imaginative and Innovative
Cat Board features a creative, distinctive identity built around a cats-and-keyboards theme, inspired by the familiar habit of cats sitting on keyboards while people write. This motif informed the app’s name, logo, and genre icons, creating a cohesive and memorable brand.
Beyond visuals, Cat Board focuses on innovation in user motivation by exploring new ways to encourage thoughtful, high-quality feedback—helping the platform stand apart from competitors while strengthening community trust.
Inviting and Friendly
Cat Board is designed with a warm, approachable personality intended to feel inviting and charming to its users. This personality is expressed through thoughtful color choices, visual styling, and a cohesive theme. Typography was selected to balance warmth and approachability with clarity and legibility, ensuring the interface feels welcoming without sacrificing usability.
I made four main flows
Signing Up Flow: making an account, choosing preferences for the types of writing projects
Giving feedback on other users' writing projects
Posting their own writing project
Messaging a fellow writer
Plotting the Journey
Wrestling With Motivation, Page by Page
The following features were prioritized:
Feature for sharing stories, giving and receiving writing projects
Forum feature: to give amateur writers a way to ask each other writing related questions and provide advice
Messages: users able to connect with other writers on a more personal level, providing them a chance to have a writing partner
Cover images: users stated that they liked being able to add pictures to their writing projects, to add to the add visual appeal
These features were chosen to support amateur writers in being able to connect and help each other grow as they work on their writing projects.
Testing
I conducted moderated user testing over Zoom video calls with the same users. The test was for these flows: The signing up flows, giving feedback, receiving feedback, and checking messages.
I conducted moderated usability testing over Zoom to evaluate three primary flows: Signing Up, Giving Feedback, Posting Story, and Checking Messages. Participants were also encouraged to explore the full end-to-end app and provide additional feedback.
The study included four amateur writers—ranging from casual hobbyists to one with professional publishing experience—who wrote across formats including stories, poems, songs, blogs, and articles.. Overall feedback was highly positive, with a 100% task completion rate across all flows. Each task was completed in under one minutes, indicating that the experience was efficient and easy to navigate.
The most significant design changes, along with the rationale behind them, are outlined below.
Polishing the Pages
Bottom Nav Bar
I redesigned the bottom navigation to reduce confusion around messaging. Users were unsure whether to look for messages under Community or Notifications, so I removed the notifications tab entirely and instead added contextual notification badges directly to relevant nav items. Messages from friends now appear on the Community icon, while feedback on stories surfaces on the My Stories icon, making notifications clearer and more intuitive.
Improving Button Experience
I added back buttons to multi-step screens, allowing users to recover from mistakes without restarting a flow.
I increased visual differentiation between primary and secondary buttons. This helped users more easily identify key actions, improving clarity and reducing hesitation during decision-making.
Story Cover Screens
Users were confused by having both “Next” and “Continue” buttons, unsure whether the actions were different, the interaction felt redundant. To resolve this, I removed the “Next” button and retained a single, clear “Continue” action.
This change also reduced visual clutter, allowing the cover image to feel more focused and intentional.
Additionally, I introduced the ability to like a piece after finishing it, creating a more natural moment for engagement at the end of the reading experience.
Feedback Summary Screen
I differentiated the “Add Feedback” and “Edit Feedback” states, by reducing the size of the edit feedback field and applied a bolder outline, making it immediately clear when a user was editing existing feedback versus writing new feedback.
I also added the sentence that the user commented on directly above the feedback field. This ensured that when users returned to edit their feedback, they retained clear context about what the comment referred to, reducing confusion and improving accuracy.
