Portfolio

Author: sandraxi

  • Community messaging – WhatsApp – 2024

    WhatsApp Project
    The Challenge

    Transform WhatsApp from a 1:1 messaging app into a place for meaningful community building. It must keep privacy, simplicity, and reliability across 120+ countries.

    Users were already creating workarounds to connect with real-world networks, but it was messy and hard to navigate.

    People wanted to use WhatsApp for groups and communities, but the app wasn’t built for it. Messages got overwhelming, finding groups was impossible, and navigation was a mess.

    My role

    Led a team through a journey to achieve product-market fit. Inherited an initial MVP and guided two designers through phases 2 and 3 of the transformation.

    Part I: Users didn’t get it

    Users understood structure but not the value proposition.

    Solution 1: Better announcements

    Transformed announcements from one way messaging to a hybrid post format, adding reactions and threaded responses while preserving privacy

    Impact: We delivered broadcast-bubbles and replies. These features distinguished the broadcast space. UXR validation showed improved comprehension between announcements and regular chats.

    Solution 2: Navigation to provide clarity

    Radical navigation redesign creating explicit “community spaces” with clear group relationships

    Impact: Increased sub-group discovery by 7% and reinforced nested interaction model. AndroidPolice recognized navigation improvements: “navigating communities easier with a new icon.” Research shows significantly improved comprehension for Communities and subgroups.

    Part II: Pivot to member-driven growth

    The problem: Only admins could grow communities. Too many permission restrictions meant growth stalled.

    Solution 1: Let members suggest groups

    Conceptualized distributed ownership model with member-suggested groups, ensuring coherent integration with existing permission framework

    Impact: Established strategic foundation for member-driven growth while maintaining design consistency across community features.

    Solution 2: Open groups by default
    I changed WhatsApp from closed-by-default to open-by-default for communities.

    Impact: Group joins doubled, Added about 500K new people joining communities

    Results

    Scale: 120 million active Communities globally serving organizations from schools to crisis response teams

    Product-market fit: Achieved 19M daily-senders, hitting all our top-line PMF goals. This bent the Communities trajectory from a PMF crisis to exceeding goals. This occurred during a period when “success was not guaranteed.”

    Growth innovation: Shifted from admin-dependent to member-driven growth, enabling sustainable organic

    Speed: Shipped 20+ features during Q3 focus room to exit and turnaround struggling product to PMF.

    Real-world use

    Live at: Download WhatsApp

    Employer: Meta

    Year: 2024

    Role: I led the design team to achieve product-market fit.


  • Connected gym experience – Blink Fitness – 2018

    Connected gym experience – Blink Fitness – 2018

    Turning a 6-week project into a year-long innovation partnership

    Blink Fitness hired Fuzz to reimagine their member experience. What started as a 6-week engagement became a year-long collaboration that positioned both companies as leaders in connected fitness.

    Blink needed to differentiate in the crowded budget fitness market and improve operational efficiency at their growing chain of locations.

    My role

    Led experience design strategy and execution. Built Fuzz’s experience design practice while delivering two major innovations for Blink.

    With Blink I accomplished three things for Fuzz:

    • Built the experience design practice into an integral part of the company
    • Position Fuzz as an innovator in the connected experience space 
    • Setup a process for research, design and development to innovate and work effectively.

    Below I share an overview of two key projects I led for Blink  

    Project 1: Activated gym experiences
    Activated experiences features

    The goal: Create connected in-gym experiences that would position Blink as an innovation leader.

    Achievements: 

    • Live working demo in 6 weeks at Fuzz’s model fitness center “Blink Roebling Street”
    • A roadmap that prioritized features by its impact on users, business and tech feasibility. 
    • Launch the first feature at Blink Fitness Grand Central location
    A new Front Desk experience

    The goal was to increase the number of joins. We aimed to improve the experience of members and employees at the entrance. This involved reimagining the front desk interactions. 

    Achievements: 

    • A fully developed demo in 6 months of a new experience in the front desk loved by members and employees. 
    • Working demo performed better in all the established benchmarks
    • Membership sign-up time was 3 minutes faster, checking into the gym took half the time, making a retail purchase was also reduced from 2 minutes to 1 minute. We were able to reduce devices from 20 to 8 with the new ecosystem, and staff did not require any training to use the experience.
    Example of a CTA for a situated interface for an entrance in a retail space.

    We pressure tested our design of a new front desk experience for a major gym chain in our lab environment. This involved running realistic ‘peak-time’ scenarios. Over 40 research participants entered the front desk area to carry out an array of tasks. We identified key operational and customer pain-points through this effort, which we solved in later iterations.

    “I was very impressed that Sandra was able to jump quickly onto the Blink Activated Experiences project and ‘right the ship’ as it were on a project that was very tricky. In general, I am impressed by how she mentors other members of the team and pushes them to do their best as well. She is great to work with, super sharp and super communicative. She’s been an asset on Blink.”

    Product Manager at Fuzz

  • PC Optimum

    A digital experience for Loblaw’s loyalty program in Canada.

    In 2016 Loblaw hired Huge to work alongside them to merge their two loyalty programs: 8M PC Plus and 11M Shoppers Optimum. This effort created Canada’s first unified digital-first loyalty experience. I led UX strategy for the most complex aspects: personalized offers, account merging, and multi-brand integration across Loblaw’s retail ecosystem.

    The design solution

    Unified digital experience: Created a mobile-first architecture. It features simplified redemption mechanics (10,000 points = $10). There is an intelligent personalized offers feed. It includes seamless cross-brand navigation.

    Strategic merger approach: The UX foundation was designed to retain both user bases. It creates intuitive value propositions. These propositions scale across grocery, pharmacy, and retail.

    Complex system integration: We solved the unprecedented challenge. We unified two distinct loyalty ecosystems. This created a cohesive experience for 19 million users.

    Impact and results

    Scale: Designed the largest loyalty program merger in Canadian history unifying 19 million users into a single platform.

    Long-term design system: The design foundation my team created enabled PC Optimum to the following:

    • #1 loyalty program in Canada (38.2% market preference)
    • 17+ million active users (50% of Canadian adults)
    • $1 billion annual redemptions by 2024

    TIMELINE

    VIEW ONLINE

    ROLE

    2016 – 2017

    App Store

    PC Optimum website

    Loblaws

    Led foundational UX design for program merger and launch.

    Pull up for a brand moment.
    My team defined the IA of each offer

  • TrueBlue relaunch

    Live at: https://trueblue.jetblue.com

    Client: Jetblue

    Year: 2017

    Role: UX Lead (freelance at BigSpaceship)

    Big Spaceship Design Team:
    Heather Harrigan (VP Design)
    Syed Lagoon (UX)
    Jared Bell (Design)

    JetBlue​ requested​ ​Big​ ​Spaceship to​ ​redesign​ ​their​ ​digital​ ​platforms.​ ​I was involved in the ​foundational​ ​ ​UX​ ​and​ ​Design​ ​phase​ ​for​ ​the​ ​redesign​ ​of​ ​the​ ​TrueBlue​ ​ (trueblue.jetblue.com).​ ​

    My role consisted in defining a design-centered agile process to ensure a successful project that followed a user-centered approach.

    Product showcase

    Images with final designs and a quick summary of key features/contributions made to the project.

    • Defined the agile process and ensured painless delivery of design files to JetBlue development team.
    • The site is now responsive. For the enrollment flow I looked to improve the experience of users who don’t remember their passwords.
    • Looked at ways to simplify how we communicated the program to first time users.
    • Created different user archetypes for the design team to pressure test how the experience scales in different contexts.
    • Simplified navigation and IA, trying to avoid creating a long dashboard.
    • We found out through data that one of the main reasons users login to TrueBlue is to get points with program partners. We optimized the experience for that common use-case.
    • The previous experience integrated with a third party badge system. We found an elegant solution to integrate that within our new design.
    • Worked at ways to redefine how pools are communicated .
    • For example, this is Floyd, an active user that pools points with his family.
    • This is Eleanor, she belongs to a Pool but does not have access to all the points of the pool.
  • The Guardian Labs

    The Guardian Labs

    Guardian Labs is the branded content arm of the Guardian. They create engaging stories that connect brands to audiences. Producing highly customized interactive stories were expensive, not scalable and inefficient. They needed tools to build digital stories for the brands and become a become a technology expertise.

    How can the Guardian Labs deliver exceptional branded content fast, while staying true to their tailor-made approach?

    The Guardian Labs partnered with Code and Theory to collaborate with a multi-disciplined content team and build their first storytelling platform.

    The new platform system allowed the Guardian Labs to build a series of co-created case studies with Cisco in a very short timeline.

    Stories go beyond connecting articles. We wanted to create narrative arcs to engage readers providing them the ability to follow stories.

    We defined two ways to path users: at the beginning with a call to action for next story. And at the end of the story with a package that provides an overview of the upcoming stories.

    To increase engagement on articles, the structure should allow for rhythm and variation in the density. As the user scrolls down, the narrative arc will evolve.

    I led the strategy, ux and creative for this project.

    With our framework and CMS, Code and Theory has empowered The Guardian Labs to create complex interactive series for future branded partnerships with ease, elegance, and clarity.

    The first five interactive articles created with our new platform and CMS circulated widely, with more than 105,000 shares.
    Cisco, the first advertiser to use our new framework, was the top performing native advertiser in The Guardian’s history.