Designing Celebration Moments & Search 2.0 for Scalable Discovery
Product design & strategy
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Responsive Web
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2025
My role
As the founder of Wall of Portfolios, I owned the full product lifecycle — from identifying growth gaps to defining strategy, designing the experience, and shipping it end-to-end.
Context — About Wall of Portfolios
Wall of Portfolios is a curated platform where designers showcase high-quality, structured portfolios, and recruiters discover top design talent.
Problem statement
The platform had strong value but weak compounding behaviour. Despite growing to ~5K users and ~20K monthly visitors, growth wasn’t accelerating and discovery didn’t scale with content.
⚠️
Growth Was Not Compounding
Designers were getting featured
No recognition or closure after onboarding
Achievements felt incomplete
Weak product-led growth (low sharing)
🔍
Discovery Was Limited
Users wanted to search by skills, company, and industry, but search was limited to designer names
High effort to find relevant designers
Approach to Solving the Problem
Based on user behaviour and product gaps, I defined principles to strengthen recognition, improve discovery, and drive product-led growth.
🎉
Reinforce achievements
Reinforce achievements through meaningful recognition
🔍
Contextual Discovery
Enable discovery through company, skills, and context
⚙️
Reduce effort
Reduce effort by structuring, not adding, discovery paths
🚀
Product-Led Growth
Drive growth through product-led moments
Reinforcing Achievement Through Recognition - The Celebrate mode
Portfolio creation involves high effort and emotional investment, but getting featured didn’t translate into a strong sense of achievement. The experience lacked recognition that made the effort feel worthwhile and worth sharing.
Recognition makes effort feel worth it. Across platforms like ADPList, Contra, Framer, Cult.fit, and Apple Fitness, milestones are celebrated visually and contextually, giving users something worth sharing.
Other Visual iterations
Key Design Decisions
Made achievement feel earned by highlighting “Only 30% get featured”, reinforcing rarity and perceived value
Designed for natural sharing by framing it as “capture this moment” and offering a downloadable onboarding kit with shareable assets
Enabling Context-Driven Discovery - Search 2.O
Search 1.0 was limited to name-based queries, making it difficult to discover relevant designers. As the platform grew and more data was generated, the existing search didn’t scale to support flexible exploration.
User behavior showed a need to search beyond names — through company, skills, and roles. Discovery becomes more effective when it supports intent, not just identity.
Company SRP Design
Key Design Decisions
Moved from name-based → context-driven discovery (company, skills, roles)
Made company pages a discovery layer
Surfaced alumni journeys to add career context & enabled users to understand the quality bar for each company
Impact
Driving Product-Led Organic Growth
Celebrate mode drove natural sharing — 1 in 4 featured designers downloaded the onboarding kit, creating peer-driven organic growth loops.
Company pages created new high-intent entry points via search queries
Registered users grew by ~300%+ in 4 months, driven by product-led organic acquisition
Monthly traffic increased by ~70%+ in 4 months, through SEO and discovery improvements