Intro
A healthtech mobile application that generates personalized skincare routines through AI-powered face analysis.
The app needed to support two distinct brands:
- One feature-rich and expressive
- One minimal and editorial
As a Product Designer, I focused on simplifying the existing system and adapting it across both brand directions, ensuring consistency while enabling a more minimal product experience.
Problem
Product Manager
The product started from Material Design as its foundation - a reasonable, well-established starting point that gave the first brand real structure and functionality to build on. That first brand was feature-rich and expressive, and Material Design's density and component richness suited it well. But when a second, minimal and editorial brand direction was introduced, the same foundation became a liability rather than an asset: Material Design's own conventions - visible elevation and dense component variants were inherently at odds with an editorial feel.
40-50 UI components in the original system
2× design and development effort required per feature
15–20 screens impacted per new feature release
Key findings
Most of the complexity lived in Material Design's own visual conventions, not the underlying function The core interaction patterns - how a form works, and how navigation behaves, were largely reusable across both brands
Component variations had accumulated ad hoc, on top of an already-opinionated base Many of the 40–50 components weren't just Material Design defaults - they were one-off adjustments made under deadline to stretch
The mismatch became clear through building, not just through auditing Rather than a purely theoretical audit, the first few screens for the minimal brand were actually designed and built directly in Material Design.
Solution