IMVU - Hashtags
Role
Director, Product Design
Timeline
8 mos
Teams
Eng, Product, Marketing
Platforms
iOS, Android, Web
OVERVIEW
Problem & Opportunity
IMVU is a social 3D app built around relationships and a thriving UGC economy. As content grew, new users got overwhelmed and existing ones saw stale suggestions—hurting engagement and retention. We needed a shared tagging language, simple user tools, and an ML-backed structure to deliver more personalized, engaging content.
MY ROLE
Partnering closely with my lead designer, I used this project as a growth opportunity—bringing them into every key XFN conversation and decision. Together, we refined scope, focused on high-impact areas, and mapped a scalable foundation to support IMVU’s broad ecosystem of users, products, and rooms.
DISCOVERY & DIRECTION
Moving Forward Together
Coached my lead designer through ambiguity—helping them prioritize decisions across UI/UX, stakeholder alignment, and MVP constraints with design system crossover. Supported growth through daily stand-ups, weekly 1:1s, mock sessions, workshops, design reviews, and QA.
DESIGN PROCESS & EXECUTION
Clearing up Complexity
Partnered with my lead designer to define key problem areas and shape solutions that improved clarity, flow, and engagement. Coached them on collaborating with cross-functional partners to better understand scope and make more informed design decisions.
Discovering New Possibilities
Parallel Design Focus
OUPTUT
Built What Mattered Most
We hit delays from technical blockers and over-scoped work. I flagged this early and worked with leadership to refocus. We trimmed non-essential search features, adjusted iOS system plans, and pushed broader hashtag architecture to later phases.
Onboarding
Incentivized onboarding through our quest system for first time users as well as separately for Hashtag event on launch increasing adoption and first time conversion.
Search Users
Searching is the primary function to discover new meaningful connections outside of chat rooms and feed. This helped build stronger structure around our core retention mechanics, friending and following.
Profile Interests
Ensuring users have full capability to seamlessly add interests to profile while viewing other users interest to connect. This enables control and foundation to feed our AI/ML future tech.
Chat Room Visibility
Common or top hashtags of users in rooms can lead to discovering users to connect further and create organic ice breakers. This helped focus on our magnifying our retention with users who join rooms, chat, and friend others within D0-30 range.
Over 20 components, documentation, and foundations designed and implemented from Design System. This boosted release across 2 platforms, and our language was elevated across half of our core features.
Marketing Campaign
Our onboarding event and launch went smoothly with the version release on app and play stores, due to having marketing involved as early as our exploration phases.
RESULTS
We hit and exceed some metric goals, but were unable to release more foundational ML tech and had to phase out room hashtags and product hashtags which didn't allow us to accelerate monetization.
REFLECTION
Looking Back and Forward
We gained valuable learnings, but also uncovered key gaps in cross-functional communication and planning that affected timelines and effort. I co-led a retro with the engineering director to bring all teams together, reflect, and document takeaways for future improvements.