Celebrating joyful moments with customized postcards
I worked as the sole product designer for Celebrate, leading the process from ideation to final prototype.
Duration
Sep - Dec 2025
About Celebrate
An app that lets users browse, customize, and send postcards—inviting loved ones to share life’s in-between moments.
Adults struggle to stay in touch with their friends.
Post-graduation, many of us found ourselves reflecting on how keeping in touch becomes harder as our lives stretch. Even when we learn to be intentional in reconnecting, we often lose the threads, because our attention scatters to other responsibilities in front of our eyes.
User research
1 / Loss of shared context
One friend shared that not being in the physicality of someone’s everyday world leads to the loss of shared context. The simple “how’re you doing” requires lengthy introductions to a coworker, or a place where your friend’ve never been to and soon becomes burdensome.
2 / Missed in-between moments
One friend complained that catch-ups often collapse into big life updates— changing jobs, moving house, relationship news and miss the in-between moments of her daily emotions and random thoughts.
Questions I asked:
· How might we preserve shared context as relationships stretch across time and place?
· How might we enable the sharing of in-between moments without the pressure of a full conversation?
· How might we reduce the cognitive load of reconnecting after time has passed?
· How might we make reaching out feel lightweight, meaningful, and human?
Postcards as the medium
· Unlike calls or chats, postcards don’t compete for attention. They can be returned to later, while still signalling care and intention.
· Postcards lower the emotional cost of reaching out—they simply say, “I thought of you.”
· Postcards allow people to express themselves through a blend of words and images, capturing moments that feel too small for a conversation but too meaningful to forget.
Insights
· Most of our users use standard social medium such as Messenger, Instagram and SMS to catch up with loved ones.
· These modes of communication do not allow for accounts categorizing; therefore, the chat list is cluttered with most-recent contacts. Long-distance contacts is buried with time, which leads to them being forgotten.
· Some users are often unsure of what to share with their friends.
How might we make reaching out feel lightweight, meaningful, and human?
1 / Default modes of communication
Postcards are shared through users’ existing communication channels, lowering the barrier to adoption and preserving conversational context by keeping interactions in a single, familiar thread.
Users can add their loved ones’ contacts, creating a focused space for connection. Rather than an exhaustive address book, this intentional curation encourages more mindful outreach and helps users stay present in the relationships that matter most.
2 / Prompts
Previous research indicated that people express themselves more openly when prompted. Products like Hinge demonstrate how well-designed prompting can help users share more authentic parts of themselves. Based on this insight, I consider prompting in all stages of the experience and utilize AI to personalize prompts to users’ needs.
Content prompting
After users select a postcard, self-reflection prompts appear, tailored to the card’s theme and the current season. A text input follows to encourage users to play around with their thoughts. Users also have the option to dismiss the suggestion, if needed.
Visual prompting
AI can provide guidance on postcard layout.
User can request support directly from AI helper.
3 / Joyful experience
Postcards become a testament to how relationships evolve over time. The app invites people to celebrate accomplishments, cherish the mundane, and quietly cheer on life alongside their loved ones. To increase user stickiness, I weave in moments of delight and subtle Easter eggs throughout the experience.
Celebrate the moment users sent away a postcard!
Revisit postcards users shared with their loved ones