A mixed-methods research study and UX redesign that addressed safety gaps in a teen social app by improving verification, simplifying navigation, and better supporting real-world connection.
Making friends as a teen can be difficult, especially when social circles are often limited to school, activities, or who already knows whom. Lit Teen Social was created to give teens ages 13-19 another way to meet like-minded peers, discover local events, and build friendships beyond their immediate school communities.
But when our team first explored the app, we noticed a tension between its mission and the existing experience. The app felt familiar because it borrowed patterns from other social platforms, but those same patterns also risked encouraging passive scrolling instead of helping teens take action, attend events, join activities, or connect in real life.
For a teen-focused app, this raised a larger design challenge: how do you create an experience that feels engaging to teens while still prioritizing safety, verification, privacy, and trust?
Our team set out to understand the full onboarding and social experience: where users might feel confused, where safety gaps could appear, and which features best supported the app's mission. Through stakeholder meetings, heuristic evaluation, task analysis, personas, journey mapping, prototyping, and usability testing, we redesigned the app's safety, navigation, and feature structure so each design decision was grounded in research rather than assumption.
"How might we make the app feel engaging and familiar to teens while creating clearer pathways for safety, without turning into another endless scroll platform?"
Lit Teen Social had a clear mission: help teens meet like-minded teens, discover new events, and build meaningful friendships. The existing experience didn't always support that mission clearly, while having several usability and safety issues. The sign-up and verification flow was easy to bypass, profile setup happened before verification, and the app's purpose was not immediately clear to new users.
The app also had many familiar social features competing for attention. Feed, events, chat, rewards, marketplace, freebies, deals, and challenges all appeared important, but not all of them clearly supported the product's core goal: helping teens connect with others safely and participate in real-world activities.
The biggest issue was onboarding and verification. Users could create a profile before completing any meaningful verification and the process relied heavily on self-reported information — specifically a birthday and parent email. These could be bypassed by entering any birthday or using a secondary email, which is not enough protection for a teen-only platform. This was a safety failure.
Original onboarding and profile setup screens — existing pain points
We used a mixed-methods UX research process to understand the product from multiple angles. Because this was a real-client project, stakeholder collaboration shaped the work throughout the semester. I led weekly meetings where we discussed the client's goals, safety concerns, feature priorities, and constraints around verification, moderation, parent involvement, events, marketplace access, and teen engagement.
Heuristic Evaluation to identify usability issues across the existing app experience
Task Analysis to examine how users moved through onboarding and sign-up
Personas to represent different teen user types and safety risks
Journey mapping to understand how a limit-testing teen might experience the app
Feature analysis to separate core features from secondary features
Prototyping to redesign onboarding, verification, feed, chat, and navigation
Usability testing to compare the existing app direction with our redesigned version
We wanted each design decision to connect back to a research finding, stakeholder need, or safety concern.
Persona overview and Ben journey map
Heuristic evaluation — existing app
After reviewing our research findings, stakeholder discussions, and usability test feedback, three major needs became clear. Not everything the app was doing mattered equally.
Synthesis artifacts
One of my largest contributions was the verification system. Task analysis and journey mapping showed that the original verification flow could be bypassed and happened too late in the onboarding process. I moved verification before public profile creation and created verification paths for younger and older teens.
The revised verification concept uses an age-based approach. Younger teens would verify through a face scan and parent or guardian phone number, while older teens would complete a face scan with an additional form of documentation — such as a school ID or government ID — supported through a third-party verification API. This approach was designed to improve safety while recognizing the difference in maturity and access to documentation in younger vs. older teens.
I recommended that Lit Teen Social avoid storing sensitive ID or biometric data directly in its own system. The team suggested using a third-party verification provider and storing only the minimum verification result needed — such as verified status, age confirmation, timestamp, and vendor transaction ID. Usability testing confirmed this: participants wanted to know what information the app was storing and why.
Redesigned verification flow
The creation of the Lit Hub was informed by our information architecture work and feature prioritization. We separated primary mission-driven features from secondary engagement or business features and moved several secondary actions into the Lit Hub. Friend-making, events, activities, and challenges were more directly connected to the app's purpose. Rewards, freebies, deals, marketplace, and badges were less directly connected and needed clearer definitions or stronger safety considerations. This allowed the main experience to focus on connection while giving users access to the secondary features — Meet Friends, Events, Rewards, Freebies and Deals, and Marketplace — from one organized place.
Lit Hub — centralized secondary features
Chat — consolidated and relabeled
Heuristic evaluation, nomenclature review, stakeholder feedback, and usability testing showed that labels like "LTS Connect Chat," "Chat," "Global," "Friends," and "Groups" could confuse users. These overlapping labels made it harder for users to understand who they were messaging and what type of communication space they were entering. We supported consolidating chat-related features, removing "Friends" from the messaging page, and clarifying the purpose of each messaging space. Direct messages, group chats, and monitored public or local chats should feel distinct from one another. Usability testing supported renaming "Global" to something clearer — "Local Chat" or "City Chat" were the strongest candidates. A nomenclature document gave the client a language reference to maintain consistency going forward.
We supported consolidating chat-related features by removing “Friends” from the messaging page, and clarifying the purpose of each messaging space. Direct messages, group chats, and monitored public or local chats should feel distinct from one another. Usability testing supported this because participants found some messaging labels confusing, so we later recommended renaming “Global” to something clearer, such as “Local Chat” or “City Chat,” to better explain its function.
We conducted usability testing with 6 participants between the ages of 17 and 27. Two participants were within the app's target teen age range. Because the participant pool was based on who was available and proximity to the target age range, the findings should be treated as early validation rather than final proof.
To organize our usability findings, we used a DIARR matrix to connect data, insights, recommended actions, risks, and participant quotes. This helped us move beyond surface-level observations and identify which issues needed the most attention. The matrix showed that participants generally understood the app's purpose, but also raised recurring concerns around teen safety, Global/LTS Connect Chat, marketplace risks, confusing messaging labels, redundant navigation routes, and rewards that could encourage more screen time instead of real-world connection.
Usability test findings
The usability test suggested that our redesigned version better communicated the app's purpose and felt safer because of stronger verification. Participants also valued some familiar patterns from the original version, which helped us recommend a hybrid direction: keep the stronger safety and event-focused structure from the redesign while continuing to simplify navigation and preserve familiar interaction patterns where they helped users. The strongest issues to refine before implementation included confusing messaging labels, marketplace risks, rewards, Global Chat moderation, parent involvement, and age-range boundaries.
Our final recommendations gave Lit Teen Social a clearer product direction for improving safety, onboarding, navigation, and teen-centered usability. The redesigned direction included a stronger verification flow that moved safety before social access, clearer onboarding with progress indicators and transparent explanations, improved navigation that reduced duplicate routes and confusing labels, a more focused feed and events structure to support real-world connection, a centralized Lit Hub for secondary features, consolidated chat categories, and additional safety recommendations for parent approval, moderation, privacy, reporting, marketplace access, and age-out policies.
This project challenged me to examine how a platform can create a safe space for vulnerable groups and promote healthy community — more than simply promoting engagement. Safety has to shape onboarding, navigation, privacy, moderation, feature access, and the overall product strategy. If we couldn't explain why a decision existed, it didn't make the cut.
Working with a real client also taught me how much design depends on collaboration. Our ideas improved through weekly stakeholder conversations, team critique, usability testing, and continued reflection on what we could realistically complete within the semester.
If I continued this project, I would prioritize another round of usability testing with teens and parents, then further develop the safety-critical flows before expanding engagement features. The strongest version of Lit Teen Social is one that feels fun to use while keeping teens safe and making real-world connection central to the online experience.