What I did.
I worked on the product design of Owls Tonight from concept to MVP, contributing to the definition of the user experience, key flows and core interactions.
My role included shaping the app's main features, designing the interface and collaborating with developers throughout an agile process with weekly releases and continuous iteration.
Key learnings.
Designing around time-bound interactions helped shape both features and user behavior.
Ephemerality and limited duration were crucial to maintaining authenticity and safety.
Weekly releases and testing guided decisions more than initial assumptions.
Overview.
Owls Tonight is an MVP-phase mobile application available on both iOS and Android, designed as a time-based social platform built around nightlife experiences.
The app is structured around a dual nature:
- during the day, users explore upcoming events through a calendar experience
- at night, the app transforms into a temporary social network tied to real-life moments
The goal of the project was to explore how temporality and ephemerality could shape a more authentic and lightweight social experience, while testing the viability of such a model through a real MVP released to the market.
Product concept: a social network that exists only at night.
Owls Tonight was conceived around a simple but strong idea: a social network that only exists during the night. Users can share short 5-second videos called "shots", interact with friends, and engage with content that disappears at the end of the evening.
This temporal constraint was not just a technical feature, but a core design choice aimed at:
- encouraging spontaneity
- reducing performance anxiety
- avoiding long-term content accumulation
- reinforcing the connection between digital and physical experiences
User flow.
The user flow below shows how users move from discovering events during the day to engaging in social interactions during the night.
It highlights the transition between the two modes of the app and the core actions available in each phase.
Selected screens and interactions.
These screens illustrate how the product concept translates into interface design across both daytime and nighttime experiences.
During the day, the interface supports event discovery and anticipation through a calendar-based experience and a countdown to the upcoming night, helping users understand what will happen and when.
At night, the UI shifts towards immediacy and social interaction, prioritizing quick content creation, lightweight navigation and fast access to friends and shared moments.
Daytime screens
Nighttime screens