Personal Project
Love Island USA is a hugely popular reality show on Peacock where contestants spend a month on an island, isolated from the outside world, in search of love. It's an entertaining show to watch with friends, with viewers playing an active role by voting through the Love Island USA app to decide which islanders are eliminated.
The official app looks and functions poorly. It currently has a 1.9 star rating on the App Store, with reviews consistently echoing the same complaints. This is clearly a missed opportunity for Peacock. Given the app's high level of engagement, it could serve as an effective platform for advertising, merchandise sales, and deeper audience interaction.
I challenged myself to redesign the official Love Island USA app, using the project as an opportunity to explore how AI tools could fit into my design workflow.
To better understand why the app is so disliked, I conducted user research with college-aged fans of the show. Their feedback revealed recurring frustrations with the overall app experience.
"It sucks and the UI is clunky."
"It looks archaic."
"I'm not inclined to do anything besides vote."
I also did my own deep dive of the app. A few issues immediately stood out:
The research highlighted a clear need to redesign the app around the needs and expectations of its fans, which led to the following question:
How might the Love Island USA app be redesigned to improve the fan experience?
To guide the ideation process, I created two personas that represented the two primary types of Love Island USA viewers identified through my research.
It was also important to consider the stakeholders' needs throughout the design process, balancing user needs with Peacock's business goals of driving revenue through advertising and merchandise sales.
I experimented with Claude Design to generate wireframes, but it lacked context about the underlying design problem and produced layouts that didn’t reflect real user needs. It also made iteration difficult, so I created the low-fidelity wireframes in Figma instead. I then shared the wireframes with fans of the show to gather feedback on the layout and incorporated their input into the next design iteration.
Next, I built the design system, pulling colors and typography directly from the show’s branding. Claude Code helped me expand the system quickly, handling simple components like buttons and text fields well. It struggled with more complex components, such as cards, so I designed those myself.
Once the design system was finalized, I progressed to high-fidelity designs. To speed up the process, I used Claude Code to generate an initial pass based on my low-fidelity wireframes and design system, then refined the designs to match my vision.
The home screen aligns with modern app experiences.
Added an Islanders tab to the navigation bar. This helps casual fans keep track of who's coupled up and who's still in the villa, while giving superfans quick access to their favorite contestants' social media.
Reimagined the voting flow to reduce friction and confusion.
Added a more effective Shop page to encourage browsing. Rather than building a full purchase flow, I enabled users to tap on merchandise and purchase directly from Peacock’s Love Island USA online store, a more practical approach for this project.
Refined the Extras page to improve its visual hierarchy.
AI is most effective with clear direction. Providing specific instructions and concrete references accelerated execution and produced results closer to my vision, though I still needed to refine the work to arrive at the final design.
