Umee Rebrand Project

October 2023 - March 2024

a Umee project

Rebrand project defining brand guidelines & design system and integrate into brand-consistent screens across teams, ready for development.

Role

UX Designer/Researcher

Duration

2 Quarters

Deliverables

Brand guidelines, design system, brand-integrated high-fidelity designs

Stakeholders

Design Team, Brand Design Lead, CEO

Tools

Figma, Google Suite, Trello

Project Overview

I collaborated with our brand design lead, CEO, and other designers on Umee's rebrand project to align Umee's visual identity to its mission and core values.

My Contribution:

  • Conducted competitive audit
  • Defined brand values & tone through visualization exercises and analysis
  • Contributed to brand guidelines and design system deliverables.
  • Led integration of branding and design system onto Match and Chat features.

What is Umee's vision?

Umee is an innovative community-building platform that supports members of exclusive communities (gyms, clubs, and other community organizations) by fostering connection and promoting social wellness.

Umee WebsiteLearn more about Umee
Problem

Umee lacked brand guidelines and design standards, resulting in inconsistent designs that didn't align with our mission or vision.

Goals
Project Goals

Umee's visuals, tone, and atmosphere needed to foster community building and a sense of belonging.

Umee stakeholders needed a cohesive brand identity and design system to support all future design and brand decisions.

Solution

I helped define Umee's core values then developed branding guidelines and a design system to ensure future designs embody the essence of Umee.

Rebrand Process
Research
Our Users

Older members of exclusive membership communities (gyms and other social clubs) over 40 years old. This demographic is at the highest risk for negative health outcomes resulting from the loneliness epidemic.

Animated demonstration of Umee's users
(Image for visualization purposes only, not used in the original project.)
Strategizing with Constraints

Umee planned to soft launch to three gyms the next quarter, so we focused our research on gym members to gain an understanding of exclusive communities. We could later apply our insights to other communities more broadly.

Our goal for research was to identify the user goals for our product.

What was Umee's perceived value?
What can users get out of our product?
How could we shape Umee's mission and vision into a product that fulfilled user needs and improved social outcomes?
Research Questions

Key questions we needed answered to identify Umee's perceived value:

1.

How are people currently connecting with others in their communities?

2.

What apps are people using to connect with new people?

3.

What do people look for from a hyperlocal social network service like Umee?

Shift in Business Priorities

A shift in business priorities required us to expedite our project. This forced us to postpone interviews and concentrate on brand visualization.

We needed insights to guide our visualization process, so we analyzed competing apps instead.

What we would have done if we had time to pursue user interviews:
Interview Script

Additionally, since I had already recruited two interview participants I advocated to my lead that I should follow through with those user interviews.

Limited Interviews

I interviewed two members of exclusive gym communities:

  • Gavin: 61 year old member of a local YMCA.
  • Elaine: 64 year old member of a local badminton club.
Interview Script

Gavin

Age: 61

Member of YMCA

Gavin and his wife are members of a local YMCA. They joined their YMCA community through mutual friends and wanted to keep active. Gavin doesn't really meet new people outside of the YMCA and mutual friends.

When Gavin's father passed away from heart disease, his wife and close friends helped him feel supported through the grieving process.

Gavin's favorite app is Spotify. He listens to Grateful Dead and a finance podcast recommended to him by his son.

"The YMCA community has so many members, I don't know if I could get to know everyone."
User

Elaine

Age: 64

Member of a local badminton club

Member of her badminton community for over 30 years. Joined for her love of badminton and to play with her longtime friends.

Her badminton community has been an outlet for traumatic moments of her life. She says the physical and social aspects have been invaluable outlets for her emotional healing.

Elaine played badminton her entire life and uses her membership to exercise and stay in tough with long-time and new friends.

"I need to play badminton, and I guess it's where I socialize the most."
Competitive Audit

I led research into three competitors where Umee drew most of its visual inspiration: Nextdoor, Hinge, and Meetup.

I analyzed their unique value(s), features, and advantages/disadvantages to understand their perceived value.

(click image to enlarge)
Insights
  • Nextdoor most aligned with Umee's mission – provide a platform for users to strengthen connections within their local communities. Though, Nextdoor also showed to foster negativity in echo chambers, which Umee sought to avoid.
  • A minimalist aesthetic (as used by Hinge) provides users with a straightforward experience that directs attention to other users.
    An added benefit was that minimalism is easy to implement and would leave space for future changes.
  • While users frequently used Nextdoor, Hinge, and Meetup for specific use cases, person-to-person connection was always at the center of those uses.
Brand Visualization

We needed to define Umee's core brand values to guide Umee visuals and messaging. We worked closely with our CEO to ensure we built from his vision. My Brand Lead started the visualization process by leading mood board exercises.

Mood Board Exercises

Mood boards helped us refine Umee's vision of fostering community into emblematic words and imagery that inspire feelings we wanted users to experience.

The feeling we tried to capture with this particular mood board was a sense of "belonging"

When thinking of "belonging" what words and images come to mind? I pictured nature, specifically mountains and the ocean, and feeling part of something much greater than myself – the phenomenon known as the "overview effect".

Defining Brand Values

After weeks of research, visualization exercises, and collaborative discussion, we refined Umee's mission and vision into 3 core brand values.

These values would guide our brand guidelines and design system:

Warm:

Umee is a warm, cozy place. The experience should be bright and comfortable.

Empathetic:

Umee is rooted in empathetic relationships. Genuine emotional connection is the foundation of positive relationships.

Inclusive:

Umee is for every member of community, fostering connection between users no matter who their differences.

End of Q4

At this point, we solidified Umee's brand foundation. Umee's Q1 soft launch was postponed due to development team setbacks. This allowed us to dedicate Q1 to establishing brand guidelines and a design system.

Design

In Q1 of 2024, we needed to deliver brand guidelines and a design system, then I would lead the integration of those deliverables into Umee's Match and Chat features. We used imagery from our mood boards along with our core values of warm, empathetic, and inclusive to explore logo, color, typography, tone (our brand guidelines).

Brand Guidelines: Logo, Color, Typography, Tone

The core components of Umee's visual identity.

Logo
*While this is not the logo our CEO ended up going with, our effort led us to the logo Umee uses today.
Color & Texture
Stakeholders expressed concern that incorporating too many colors would hinder integration by the end of Q1. So, we focused on orange as our CTA color to build from.
Typography
Poppins
We chose the Poppins typeface as it provided a clean and friendly aesthetic for Umee. We later built typography guidelines and type scale with our design system.
Tone
Warm
Nurturing
Energetic
Encouraging
Compassionate
Authentic
Friendly
Casual
Facilitator
Approachable
The tone of our app defined how our users would interact with each other. Establishing a positive atmosphere was critical to foster positive relationships.
Design System

Since Umee lacked design principles, we needed to define the essentials, so I collaborated closely with another designer to define spacing, text, and color. I advocated for a flexible 8 point grid system so that our designs were consistent and responsive.

Spacing
An 8pt grid system was consistent but flexible enough to adapt to screen size.
Text
We broke down our fonts into essentials – what were we actually using?
Color
We reserved orange coloring for CTAs. 
What Components are we Actually Using?

Since we had little time to build out our design system, I advocated for defining components based on need. For example, buttons were used throughout Chat and Match screens, so we should define rules for their color and padding for primary and secondary CTA buttons.

Integrate to Define

After discussions with my CEO and Design Lead, we decided I should define design system components while I integrated Match and Chat screens. This allowed me to prioritize design system components and test their functionality directly, putting us on track for Q1 OKRs.

Integrating Guidelines & Design System
I was responsible for leading the integration of our brand work into Umee's Match and Chat features which two other design teams were working on.

My responsibilities included:

  • Applying branding and design system to Match and Chat screens: logo, font, colors, tone, spacing, and advocating for user accessibility in the designs.
  • Bringing mid-fidelity Chat wireframes to high-fidelity prototypes ready for dev handoff.
  • Creating dev handoff documentation, and meeting with development lead to walk through designs.

Mid-fidelity designs

High-fidelity designs

An Iterative Process

Because these were the first designs to undergo brand integration and I was under a short deadline, the process was extremely iterative. I received daily feedback from my PM and created new designs for her and my CEO's approval.

The brand work laid the foundation, but getting the details just right required a constant cycle of feedback and iteration.

Handoff to Development Team

Dev handoff included creating design specification document for development team (design guidelines, interactions, and animations) and meeting with development lead to walk through both Chat and Match designs.

Impact

The brand and design guidelines created the basis for Umee's visual identity that was grounded in its mission and core values.

Impact across the Umee team

The Match and Chat (Spark and Banter) features I brought to high-fidelity are the core of the Umee app. These features are a design reference for all sequential features and components.

I have become a point of reference for brand governance across the Umee team for the branding and design decisions I made with my rebrand team. Specifically for: Umee slide decks, feature renaming, screen layouts, colors, textures, and buttons.
Future Progress

As new features continue to be built, more design components will need defined:

  • We have a foundation for our design system, but there are still many variables we need to define.
  • A design token system was out of scope for this project, but I have advocated for it to leadership as a system that would greatly support our dev team.
  • I am designing and defining updated branding for Onboarding, Profile, and Newsfeed features.

Conclusion

The best metric of success for this project won't be seen until after we soft launch to gyms and begin to scale. However, with the approval of my leads and CEO, the work I have done (particularly in Match and Chat features) has put Umee in the right direction to achieve our mission and business goals.

More about Umee

Umee is a health & wellness company created to address negative of the loneliness epidemic. Umee's mission is to help members of exclusive communities like gyms, country clubs, and other social groups bond and create new connections.

"The combined insights from studies by Marta Zaraska, Robert Waldinger, and Vivek Murthy redefine our understanding of health and longevity. They show that it’s about more than just what we eat or how often we exercise; it’s about our connections, community, and feeling safe within our communal networks.

Umee offers a practical solution to prioritize our “social fitness” — just as we do our physical fitness. By bridging research and technology, we're presenting a pathway to live longer, healthier, and happier lives. The evidence is clear, and the tools are at hand — it's time to harness the power of connection."

– Umee

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