WorkSpace

2025 • Product Design

Context

In early 2025, the agency I worked for, Tokyo Techies, was approached by a private university in Japan to develop closed-network app for their students. This is a place where students can find job-postings from partnering recruitment agencies, connect with alumni, or hear about campus-wide events.

I was given 48 hours to build a click-through prototype, in both English and Japanese, to present to the University’s president.

Requirements

The general idea of this product is a blend between LinkedIn, Reddit, and Meta’s Threads. The president sought after a prototype of what the student’s mobile experience with the following requirements:

  • Enable students to follow Spaces, a community forum where university admins, professors, and recruiters share posts.

  • Providing student profiles that highlight their major, GPA, and bio. This should tend to cultural differences between the U.S and Japan.

  • Support familiar social features such as comments, replies, likes, bookmarks, and notifications.

Challenge & Inspiration

The challenge for me as a designer is more frequently about having too many ideas, rather than not enough.

So to help myself with the initial work, I pulled inspiration from what I already know and love: the visual style of Medium.com, the navigational structure of Threads, and information architecture of Reddit. Given the 48 hour deadline, this sprint put my decision making, speed, and design process to the test.

Components

Working with just 3-4 shades of gray and an orange made it easy to turn something low-fidelity look high.

By using the Apple iOS 18 / iPadOS 18 Figma component library, I only needed to create a few custom, modular components for the prototype.

Left to right: Home, Spaces, Notifications, and Proflile

Simple interactions

The app should be light-weight and nothing should be difficult to find. This is one of my favorite aspects of Thread’s platform—there is very little placed behind a settings or menu icon.

Additionally, every point in the app should have redundant pathways, that is, multiple ways to get there.

Left to right: Spaces, Job Postings, Post

Localization

This app is primarily made for universities in Japan, but many of the jobs and recruiters are looking for English-speaking candidates. Thus, I made prototypes in both. Mock data and translations were possible with the help of Google Gemini.

Visual Segregation

This app has a lot of lists—spaces, posts, notifications, and users. So, I made sure to make each item clearly distinguishable in a long list of its own kind.

For this, I used thin lines, headers and sub-headers, and profile pictures to help create visual separation from each item.

How it ended

The university president and a few of his board members really enjoyed the prototype. In fact, they weren’t expecting as many features as was delivered.

However, the deal reached a stand-still when our two companies were negotiating monetization strategies. As a result, we decided to not move forward, at least for now.

Final Thoughts

If I had more time, I would’ve liked to add more interactions, an onboarding flow, direct messaging, a company profiles, and improved filtering and search.

This project really put my skills to the test—challenging my speed, refining my decision-making, and pushing me to turn vague requirements into a functional prototype.

Designing for this two-day sprint was perhaps the most fun I’ve had at work. I’m grateful for the full creative freedom I had over both the user interface and experience, and I was even more honored (and terrified) by how high the stakes were.