Senspace app
2025 > 2026
Senspace
Senspace is a freeform social space where people collect and share their life, memories, ideas, art, with people who actually care. Think journaling meets social, without the algorithm. Not a feed, not a grid. A place. I joined as Lead Product Designer, working directly with the CEO and co-founder in a small team. I built the design practice from the ground up: audit, research ops, design system, and a full product redesign.
166 → 280
+69%
Monthly active users
23.4 → 45.6
×2
Avg daily active users
5 mo
Jan to Apr 2026
01 CONTEXT
The problem
Social media had a decade to get it right. Instead it optimized for time-on-screen, turned people into content, and called it connection. Senspace was built as a refusal — a place to actually share your life with people who matter, not perform it for an algorithm.
The idea was right. The product wasn't there yet. No design system. No research practice. No shared visual language. Flows that confused people at every step. Retention was effectively zero.
02 DISCOVERY
Before touching anything
The audit came first. Every screen, every flow, documented. Not to list problems — to map them.
Then research. Before redesigning anything, I talked to people. Six interviews, Gen Z participants across Portugal, Switzerland, and the UK. Then pilot groups — real people using Senspace together over two weeks. The friction wasn't the concept. The app was getting in its own way.
03 Strategy
Prioritization
With a small team and no runway to waste, everything had to be sequenced right. Fix the foundation before adding features. Build the system before building the screens. Get the core experience working before expanding it.
The audit and research shaped a six-phase improvement plan: foundations, navigation and flows, component redesign, applying components, QA and motion, delight layer. In that order, for a reason.
Fix the foundation before adding features. Build the system before building the screens. Get the core experience working before expanding it.
04 FOUNDATIONS
Rebuilding the base
The app was using brand typefaces and brand colors directly as UI decisions. No semantic layer. No system.
I stripped it back. Rebuilt the color palette around semantic roles. Replaced the brand typography with system-appropriate type. Separated what Senspace looks like from what the interface communicates.
Then the design system — built from scratch. Variables, tokens, spacing, iconography, shadows, illustrations. Components documented and variant-complete. A file structure, naming conventions, and Linear setup. Every design handed off via Figma Dev Mode with annotations. Every ticket written, tracked, and QA'd once built.
05 REDESIGN
The redesign
With the system in place, the full product surface was redesigned. Not polished — rebuilt. Strip back to basics, define what the core experience needed to be, and build from there.
Onboarding, login, the home screen, the space canvas — everything. Canvas behaviors that didn't exist before: Single and Muliple upload dynamic, canvas, boundaries, snapping guides, gesture systems, transform tools. Every tool in the toolbar has been redesigned. New comment experience, Video extended from 20 seconds to 2 minutes, with a rebuilt crop and preview experience.
New features like AI background removal with Add/Subtract masking. Shape masking — flower, star, heart, circle, square. Voice notes recorded directly on the canvas. Explore, public and private spaces, user management, community guidelines, web-gated preview, global search, widgets, direct canvas translation.
06 VOICE
Voice, copy, and everything else
Voice and tone workshops. A consolidated copy guide. Every screen in the app rewritten. A notification formula system. Full translation across six languages: Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, and Japanese. A separate typography pass for Japanese.
The Senspace website, designed and built in Framer, with a motion prototype for the hero. The App Store listing — screenshots composed and copy written.
07 COMMUNITY
What people built
The product is only as good as the spaces inside it. A few of the ones that stuck with me:
Monthly active users grew 69%. Daily active users nearly doubled. Growth doesn't happen in a vacuum. Alongside the product work, THE CEO ran community activations that brought new people in. Design's job was to make sure they stayed.
69%
Monthly active users
~2×
Avg daily active users
5 mo
Jan to Apr 2026
Closing
Senspace exists because someone got tired of what social had become and decided to build something different. No VC backing. No growth team. A small group of people who believed the alternative was worth building.
Five months of work can take a product a long way. It can also show you exactly how much further there is to go. The foundation is there — the system, the research practice, the product, the community. What comes next is the harder part.
That's not a design problem. That's the real work of building something that lasts.
