TEAM
Creative Director and UX Designer (lead) working alongside a tight-knit crew of designers and engineers for over a year.
CHALLENGE: AVOIDING THE MASSES
In the early 2010s, video platforms were a free-for-all. YouTube was dominated by amateur content, and celebrities had no dedicated space to connect directly with fans on their own terms. High-profile talent like Kevin Hart, Timbaland, and Lenny Kravitz were sharing the same feeds as cat videos, with little control over their narrative, no real monetization, and no guarantee their content was even reaching the fans who cared most.
BeeYoo was built to fix that. A celebrity-exclusive video sharing platform where verified artists could engage fans directly, protect their content from infringement, and get paid for their influence, years before the rest of the industry even recognized the problem.
APPROACH: ASK THE INFLUENCERS
We started by asking a simple question: how do celebrities actually want to show up for their fans, and what keeps getting in the way? I led interviews with celebrity users and dug into viral video traffic data across existing platforms to find out. What came back shaped everything.
Fans and celebrities alike were living on their phones, so we built mobile first before that was an industry default, pairing a fully responsive design system with Amazon Cloud Services to scale bandwidth based on where people were watching. Social media login integration meant connecting accounts felt natural rather than like extra work.
But the most important thing we learned was that talent needed more than a stage. They needed a reason to show up consistently, and that meant getting paid. So I took ownership of the full monetization and referral experience, designing the user flows and journey maps that mapped out exactly how a celebrity goes from signup to actively earning, the referral flow and incentive structure built to make the value proposition land at a glance, an earnings dashboard giving talent real time visibility into what their influence was actually worth, and an onboarding experience designed to get celebrities activated fast. A shared design system and component library tied it all together and kept the experience consistent from first impression to first paycheck.
INSIGHTS: PRIORITIZED MOBILITY AND INTEGRATION
The data was clear. Both celebrities and their fan bases were living on their phones, and this was before mobile-first design was anywhere close to an industry default. We built around that reality with three priorities: a fully responsive mobile-first design system, early adoption of Amazon Cloud Services to scale bandwidth based on where fans were watching from, and social media login integration so connecting accounts felt seamless rather than like extra homework.
RESULTs: ORGANIC GROWTH AND MONETIZATION
Videos on the platform pulled in 10 million or more unique views, the user base grew into the millions, and the authentic fan-to-celebrity connection BeeYoo offered turned out to be exactly what people were looking for. That growth attracted serious acquisition interest in both the platform and its underlying algorithms, which felt like the clearest signal that the product vision and the UX work behind it actually landed.