Aligning User Experience to Product Vision

The Challenge

A leading social media company needed to evaluate their core product ecosystem against their 2025 product vision. The goal was to identify UX optimizations that would better match users’ actual mental models, unmet needs, and natural behaviors within the app.

The Approach

We conducted five 2-hour, in-person foundational user research sessions to map out how users navigate the platform. We dug deeply into specific user journeys: discovering local events, finding and interacting with niche communities, consuming video content, and catching up on friends’ lives.

Additionally, we evaluated the current product suite against the 2025 user experience vision to identify friction points, usability issues, and feature gaps. Finally, we concept-tested two new product features to validate user appetite and gather iterative feedback to inform the product roadmap.

The Impact

We delivered a rapid user insights report detailing how well current features support the target product vision. The deliverable provided actionable design principles, UX guardrails, and specific feature optimizations to ensure upcoming product iterations directly solved identified user pain points and enhanced the overall user journey.