Patio was a private social app for college students. I joined as a contractor in 2020 and left as Lead Designer in 2023.

Our best channel was admitted students. Before you set foot on campus you want to know who your classmates are, and we were very good at meeting people in that window. We killed it with admits.

Then they got to campus.

An admitted student becomes a freshman, and a freshman has no sway. We were asking the least powerful people on campus to pitch a new chat app to their house, their club, their team, against GroupMe threads that upperclassmen had been running for years.

Our best acquisition channel was producing our weakest ambassadors.

An app with design from an era before the app existed. You landed on a home screen with no idea what to do. If nobody had messaged you there was nothing to read. If nobody had added you to a group chat there was nowhere to write. Profiles were generic and ugly, so nobody looked like a person worth talking to.

Everything Patio offered required someone else to act first. For a freshman who didn’t know anyone yet, that’s a product with nothing in it.

The old app. Dated home screen, an empty state, a generic profile.

The obvious move was to make our chat better than everyone else’s. I argued against it.

Students already lived in GroupMe, Discord, sometimes even Slack. We were trying to be as good as the incumbents, and honestly we might have been. But the delta in chat interfaces was never going to move somebody’s entire friend group off a platform they were already using.

Our own structure was working against us too. A hundred messages could go out in an hour, but spread across a hundred different chats, the app felt dead. We were diluting the only thing we had.

So we stopped competing on chat.

We rebuilt Patio around one campus feed, with DMs underneath for one-to-one. One place instead of a hundred. Same volume of conversation, except now you could actually see it.

We also went real identity, which was the opposite of where the category was going. Every other campus feed was anonymous. Our users weren’t there to post anonymously, they were there to figure out who their classmates were. Anonymity would have killed the reason they showed up in the first place.

Before and after, side by side.

Every change after that was aimed at one person: a student who opens the app and knows nobody on it.

Feed first, chats second. The navigation carries the strategy. Feed became the first tab and chats got demoted. You open the app and land on your campus talking.

A welcome post at the top of every feed. It explains what the space is for, so there’s always something to read and nobody has to guess what to post.

Profile prompts. These were mine. I took cues from dating apps and pulled out anything romantically leading, because the mechanic makes strangers legible to each other but the romance would have changed what the app was for, and on a campus product that distinction matters for whether people feel safe. Prompts were also the one thing a new student could do completely alone. Fuller profiles got more engagement.

A visual system that gets out of the way. I led the brand and visual refresh, from pale and ornamental to high contrast dark with one confident accent. The chrome recedes and the content carries the color, which is right for a product whose content is photographs of real people. By the end of the pivot I was the only designer left on the team.

The tab bar, before and after.

Profile prompts. The “secret talent” screen.

The feed became the center of the app. Patio reached 100+ campuses, and a student could open it knowing nobody and still have a reason to be there.

The pivot proved the problem was never our chat interface. It was that we’d built a product where nothing happened until somebody else made it happen. One feed and a real name fixed that.

Real identity was the asset underneath all of it, and the feed had only started to use it.

The campus feed in use, welcome post visible.