Voice

🛠️ Process:

As Manager of Design at Block.one, I led the design organization through the full lifecycle of Voice, from early concept to shipped native product. The core leadership decisions were about constraint and conviction: what Voice would not be mattered as much as what it would be. We deliberately did not chase feature parity with existing social platforms. Instead, we researched where social media had broken trust with its communities and designed backward from that understanding.

The hardest design problems were not interface problems. They were trust problems: how do you design an identity verification flow that is rigorous enough to keep bots out but human enough not to drive real users away? How do you design a tokenized reward system that feels like genuine recognition rather than a speculative economy? How do you make content creation feel effortless on mobile when the underlying blockchain architecture added friction everywhere?

I built and scaled the design team from 2 to 7 during this period, establishing a design culture grounded in research, critique, and cross-functional collaboration with engineering and product.

View a detailed look at the Voice Social Media work ↓

✅ Results:

I led the design, design system and UX for Voice from concept to product. Voice launched and experienced a real community of users, sharing in an economy surrounding authentically owned and authored content. The app launched on both native iOS and Android, alongside a browser based version.

I continued to look ahead as we launched - aiming to continue refining and modernizing the social experience of Voice.

Product walkthrough:

Identity First

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  Verifying users were who they say they were was critical at Voice

  Perhaps the most consequential design challenge on Voice was onboarding. The platform's core promise, that every user was a real, verified person, required an identity verification process that was thorough by necessity.

  My team researched identity verification patterns across financial services, government platforms, and social products, designing flows that balanced regulatory rigor with human empathy. We landed on a progressive disclosure approach that made verification feel like a natural part of joining rather than a bureaucratic gate.

Designing for authentic content

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  A focused content creating experience

  Voice needed to celebrate its content without competing with it. We conducted deep research into what made content creation feel easy on mobile, studying the moments where users abandoned other platforms and where they felt most engaged.

  We designed a content creation experience where tools and options surfaced contextually at the moment of need, keeping the interface clean until the user was ready for more. Content could be short-form or long-form, giving users full control over how they expressed themselves.

The Voice It economy

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  Views of how content was gamified

  One of the most novel design challenges was the in-app reward system. Voice It was both a mechanism for readers to acknowledge content they valued and a competitive layer that rewarded quality participation.

  

  Views of the wallet and rewards collections space

  The underlying token economy changed frequently during development as the business model evolved. My design team built a system flexible enough to accommodate those changes without disrupting the user experience each time, designing the reward wallet and notification systems to feel intuitive even for users with no prior blockchain experience.

Feed and Discovery

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  The feed of any social media app is paramount

  The feed was designed to let content be the hero. Visually restrained and content-forward, it gave users fast access to categories, community activity, and their own reward balance without cluttering the experience. Content discovery evolved throughout development, with the MVP feed laying the groundwork for a more robust search and recommendation system.

Notifications

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  Notifications were an important aspect of engagement

  Voice shipped as a live consumer social application used by an audience of real users, one of the first blockchain-native social platforms to reach that milestone.

  The design system built for Voice was carried forward and scaled across Block.one's broader product portfolio, including Bullish, now a publicly traded crypto exchange. The team and practices built during the Voice period became the foundation for the design organization that outlasted the hypergrowth period.