Snapask

Scaling Snapask’s product and visual system for a growing Gen Z platform

Year

2020

Problems

Challenge 01

Product: the original system wasn't built for UI

The original brand system was created quickly during Snapask's early growth, without fully considering how it would scale into a digital product. As the app evolved, detailed visual assets and a low-contrast color palette made it harder to maintain clarity and hierarchy across the interface.

Challenge 02

Marketing: the mascot was difficult to scale across markets

As Snapask expanded internationally, local marketing teams needed to produce more content independently. Eve's complex design made her time-consuming to recreate, slowing production and making brand consistency harder to maintain across markets.

Challenge 03

Brand: no shared definition of Snapask's personality

During Snapask's rapid growth, we never formally defined the brand personality. As the team expanded, marketing and design began interpreting the brand differently, creating inconsistency and friction across teams.

What's Snapask's
Personality ?

Solution

Design Direction

Defining the design direction

We framed the redesign around two goals: making the product more usable and scalable, while strengthening the emotional connection with our audience.

Functional

How might we create a scalable design system that improves usability and consistency across the product?

Emotional

How might we build a brand experience that creates a stronger emotional connection with our audience?

Brand alignment

Defining Snapask's brand personality

I facilitated a workshop with designers and marketers to define four shared brand traits, creating a common framework for future brand and product decisions.

Mascot direction

Preserving what users already loved

In interviews with 13 paying users, more than 10 mentioned Eve positively. Users valued Snapask's playful visual language, which made learning feel more approachable than the more authoritative tone common in education products.
‍
Rather than replacing Eve, we decided to evolve her. We audited how other digital products used mascots and found that simpler forms and larger head-to-body proportions translated more effectively across digital interfaces.

Exploration

Exploring a more scalable Eve

We explored four directions for Eve, evaluating each against three principles: simplicity, flexibility, and memorability.

Validation

Testing preferences across 7 markets

We tested the four directions across seven markets. Younger users showed the strongest preference for No.4, while adult audiences responded more positively to No.3.

Prototyping

Testing the strongest directions in context

We advanced No.3 and No.4 and prototyped both directions across product, web, and social media to evaluate how each identity would perform in real-world applications.

Refinement

From a mascot to a scalable system

We selected No.4 for its modular head-and-body structure, which offered greater flexibility across formats. I then developed guidelines for proportions, expressions, and usage, enabling teams across markets to create new assets efficiently while maintaining brand consistency.

Design system

A clearer color system for the product

I worked with designers to increase contrast and saturation across the UI, creating clearer hierarchy while preserving Snapask's visual identity. We also defined usage ratios to make the system easier to apply consistently.

Ratio of colors

More flexibility for expressive assets

While UI colors prioritized hierarchy and usability, brand assets needed more expressive range. We created a broader palette that gave visual designers more flexibility without losing consistency.

Typography

We adopted Apple's native SF Pro family to improve readability and create a typography system optimized for iOS.

Reusable patterns for a growing design team

I standardized common dialogs, buttons, and interaction patterns into reusable components, making the system easier for product designers to adopt while keeping the experience consistent across features.

Validating the identity through the app icon

We tested three app icon directions on the Play Store. Version C delivered the strongest conversion rate and became the final direction.

Outcome

One system, built to scale across teams and markets

The redesign created a shared system across product and marketing, making Snapask easier to scale across teams and markets while preserving the playful identity users already loved.