A platform to transform how people share moments of joy through spontaneous food and drink gifting. As the Design Lead, I was responsible for creating an intuitive, emotion-driven user experience that would make digital gifting feel as personal and meaningful as a physical gesture.
Working alongside a Technical Lead, I spearheaded the design strategy, user research, and interface that would bring this vision to life. My challenge was to translate the warmth of human connection into digital interactions while ensuring the complex technical infrastructure remained invisible to users.
Design Lead
Technical Lead
The core challenge was deceptively simple: when you think of someone, you should be able to send them a small gesture of appreciation instantly—a coffee when they’re tired or a pizza when they’re working late.
What made this complex was creating an interface that would inspire these moments of connection rather than just facilitate them. As Design Lead, I needed to reimagine how users interacted with their contact lists, transforming them from organisational tools into springboards for spontaneous generosity.
The founder’s vision for Huggg emphasised building robust technology alongside focused market research. This approach centered on developing a versatile platform that could facilitate various types of exchanges between parties. The emphasis on strong technical architecture would prove crucial as the platform evolved, enabling smooth adaptation to different market opportunities.
Traditional contact lists serve primarily as organisational tools, granting users efficient access to people they already communicate with. Huggg required a fundamental rethinking of this concept. Rather than simply organising contacts, the platform needed to inspire action – prompting users to consider who in their network might appreciate a small gesture of kindness. This reimagining of contact interaction became central to the platform’s design, transforming a utilitarian feature into an engagement driver.
The interface needed to feel as warm and connected as the gesture itself. Bringing together playful interactions, thoughtful animations, and clear user flows, we created an experience that made sending joy as delightful as receiving it.
The backbone of Huggg was its notification system, orchestrating real-time communication between senders, merchants, and recipients. But notifications alone weren’t enough – each step needed its own technical infrastructure. Merchants required inventory management systems to track available items, while a complete EPOS integration was necessary for seamless redemption. Building these interconnected systems became our roadmap’s focus, with each component vital to completing the gifting journey.
As Design Lead my work on Huggg delivered several significant outcomes, taking the platform from 0—1:
While our initial peer-to-peer gifting model faced the classic chicken-and-egg marketplace challenge, the robust design and technical foundation revealed a greater opportunities. The platform we created proved remarkably adaptable, capable of facilitating various types of exchanges beyond just friend-to-friend gifting.
This adaptability enabled Huggg to pivot toward business opportunities, where companies could leverage our platform for customer engagement, employee recognition, and loyalty programs—all while maintaining the personal touch that defined the brand.
The Huggg experience demonstrated how thoughtful design, guided by strong leadership and sharp commercial insight, can bridge emotional and technical requirements, creating systems that feel human despite their complexity. The platform’s evolution from social gifting app to a versatile exchange system showcases how user-centered design principles, when paired with robust technical architecture, can open unexpected opportunities and create lasting business value.
