overview
BollyStep is an early-stage startup building a platform to help choreographers and dancers organize South Asian wedding performances. The product spans a tutorial library, learning tools, dance organization features, performer communication, and queue management — a robust offering that had matured significantly since its initial V1 launch.
With increased investor funding secured, the founder expanded the product scope for V2, adding AI-powered learning tools and enhanced practice experiences. The marketing website, however, had not kept pace. As BollyStep prepared for its most significant product launch to date, the website still reflected the constraints of its earliest days — and that gap was becoming a liability.
I owned the end-to-end redesign of BollyStep.com — from information architecture and design system to visual design and interactive product demos. Given my senior experience, the founder trusted my strategic recommendations, which extended my influence beyond execution into product prioritization and brand direction.
My Role
UX Designer
UI Designer
TEAM
Founder
Product Designer
Developer
TIMELINE
May 2026
4 weeks
(20 hours/week)
TOOLS
Figma
Information Architecture
Content Strategy
The Challenge
BollyStep's product had matured well beyond its V1 launch, but the website hadn't kept pace. With a major platform launch on the horizon, the gap between what the product could do and what the website communicated had become a real liability — one that needed to be closed in a single month.
Challenge 01
Evolving Product Vision
As an early-stage startup, the platform was evolving quickly alongside changing business needs and new opportunities. Shortly before the redesign, additional funding enabled the team to expand the product, including AI-powered features so I had to reassess recommendations and determine how the website should communicate this expanded product vision.
Challenge 02
Constrained Research in a Tight Timeline
The prior research couldn't fully apply to a reimagined product, and a tight timeline ruled out extensive new research. I relied on the existing audit, founder conversations, and my own deep familiarity with this user base — having danced, choreographed, and organized South Asian wedding performances across 20+ celebrations.
Challenge 03
Designing for a Product Still in Development
The marketing website was being built in parallel with the product. With only a subset of flows available, I worked closely with the founder and product designer to anticipate future capabilities and design demos that accurately represented the product's direction — not just its current state.
Challenge 04
Rebuilding Trust Through Design
The existing site lacked the visual credibility expected of a modern technology platform. Rebuilding that trust meant addressing the full stack: brand cohesion, typographic hierarchy, feature clarity, and accessibility — not just aesthetics.
design process
Research Review & Discovery
I began by reviewing the existing audit to extract what remained relevant — specifically around navigation pain points and brand inconsistency — while setting aside findings that no longer applied to the new product direction. Conversations with the founder clarified the V2 feature set, business priorities, and target audience, which informed both the site architecture and content strategy.
Information Architecture & Sitemap
I restructured the site around five core pages: Homepage, Tutorial Library, For Choreographers, Our Story, and Contact. The homepage was prioritized as the primary load-bearing page — it needed to serve every visitor type and communicate the full product value proposition without requiring a deeper dive. Every other page was treated as supplemental.
Design System
Early in the process, I identified that the marketing website and the product platform read as two entirely separate brands — a finding echoed in the prior research. To address this, I built a design system that could serve both surfaces, with a clear distinction between shared foundations and website-specific components.
One deliberate divergence: while the product used exclusively sans-serif typography, I introduced serif typefaces for H1 and H2 on the marketing site. The goal was to communicate brand maturity and evoke the celebratory, elevated feeling associated with South Asian weddings — a tonal shift appropriate for a marketing context but not for a functional product UI. This required buy-in from the founder, who I walked through the rationale. I worked within existing brand constraints — the established color palette and the peacock feather motif — building out a full color spectrum with specific hex recommendations and ensuring the new typographic direction felt cohesive with the existing identity.
The product designer reviewed all shared components, and anything website-specific remained local. The design system was adopted by the product team for the platform build.
Page Design
With the system in place, I moved through each page, prioritizing the homepage given its traffic weight and complexity. Across all pages, I focused heavily on content clarity and product marketing — ensuring the writing, hierarchy, and layout worked together to explain a complex, multi-feature product to a non-technical audience.
Product Demos
The homepage needed to show the product — but the product wasn't fully designed. I approached this as a design problem in itself: I pulled available screens and flows from the product designer, created additional mockups to fill narrative gaps, and prototyped them in Figma. I then used screen recordings and AI tools to produce polished demo videos that communicated the intended user experience without being bound by prototype fidelity limitations.
I reviewed every demo with the founder, developer, and product designer to ensure alignment with the product's direction and intended outcomes — acknowledging that pixel-perfect accuracy wasn't the goal, but accuracy of experience was non-negotiable.
key design decisions
1
Leading with Value Propositions, Not Features
The original direction leaned heavily on feature callouts — what the product does. I pushed for a shift toward value propositions — why BollyStep is the right choice. This reframe shaped the homepage's entire opening experience. The founder and I workshopped and prioritized these together, and the resulting value props became the first thing every visitor sees. For a product competing in a nascent market, leading with "why" is more persuasive than leading with "what."
2
Simplifying the Information Architecture
The founder initially wanted dedicated pages for each user group — dancers, choreographers, and organizers. I countered this: splitting audiences across pages would overcrowd the site and force users to self-identify before they understood the product. Instead, I recommended that the homepage serve all three user groups at a high level, giving each enough to understand the product's value. The one exception was a dedicated For Choreographers page — their journey is distinct enough to warrant it, covering the application process, pay structure, and what it actually means to choreograph through BollyStep.
3
Rethinking the Product Demo
Product demos were a requirement from the start, but with the product still in development and Figma prototype limitations in play, the approach needed careful thought. My first suggestion was a user story video: an emotionally-driven narrative following someone overwhelmed by group chats and spreadsheets, discovering BollyStep, and arriving at a synchronized, stress-free performance. The founder pushed back: the only competitor in the market uses a similar format, and differentiation was a priority.
That pushback led to a sharper solution — and a more interesting design problem. The constraints that made demos difficult in the first place became the creative brief: how do you show a product that doesn't fully exist yet? I built interactive prototypes in Figma using available screens, filling narrative gaps with supplemental mockups I designed to bridge the experience. For more complex interactions like drag and drop, I used Figma Make to prototype functionality that standard Figma couldn't handle. Those prototypes were screen-recorded and sharpened with AI to produce demos that, while not pixel-perfect to the final product, gave users a close and accurate preview of what to expect. The result was a demo experience grounded in actual product interaction, letting users see themselves navigating BollyStep rather than simply feeling inspired by it.
4
Unlocking Tutorial Previews
I advocated for giving website visitors access to preview choreography tutorials before creating an account or making a purchase. From my experience in this community, I knew that trust in the quality of the choreography is a prerequisite to purchase — people need to see what they're buying into. The founder's instinct was to keep the full library gated within the product. After pushback, she agreed to surface nine preview videos on the marketing site. It was a meaningful concession that will directly reduce acquisition friction.
5
Advocating for Reduced Friction Throughout
Reducing friction for new users was something I kept coming back to throughout the project. The most significant outcome was a low-friction entry point into the product itself: visitors who click through specific CTAs, like "Browse All Tutorials" or "Get Started Now", can explore the tutorial library and choreographers without creating an account, only hitting a login gate at checkout or form submission. It keeps casual browsers from feeling pressured while giving genuinely interested users a direct path in. Getting there required consistent pushback because the founder's instinct was to gate the experience earlier. I kept advocating for the user, and the founder and developer found the technical path to make it work.
6
Building a Shared Design System
Proposing the design system wasn't part of my original brief, but the prior audit had flagged that the marketing site and product platform read as two separate brands, and closing that gap was a clear opportunity. I built a system with clear distinctions between shared foundations and website-specific components, including a deliberate typographic divergence: while the product uses exclusively sans-serif type, I introduced serifs for H1 and H2 on the marketing site to communicate maturity and evoke the celebratory, elevated tone of South Asian weddings. The product designer reviewed all shared components, and the system was adopted for the platform build.
7
Diversifying the Video Content
The founder is deeply embedded in this community, which meant many existing videos featured her prominently. I recommended moving away from that and toward showcasing the breadth of BollyStep's 40+ choreographers. For a platform marketing professional choreography services, the credibility of the content library matters — visitors need to see diversity of style and talent, not a personal brand.
Reflections & Learnings
Learnings
The BollyStep redesign sharpened my ability to work with ambiguity at multiple levels simultaneously — an evolving product, an undeveloped visual language, and research constraints that required me to lean on judgment as much as data. It also reinforced that great marketing design is as much about content strategy and narrative as it is about visual execution.
One thing I'd approach differently: establishing clearer documentation protocols earlier. Given the pace of change — scope shifts, mid-project feature additions, parallel product development — a shared decision log would have reduced the amount of re-alignment needed across meetings.
The experience of being a member of this user community was an unusual and valuable asset on this project. It meant I could move faster on decisions where research was thin, and advocate for user needs with credibility. But it also required me to stay conscious of when my perspective might not represent the full range of users BollyStep is trying to reach.
Next Steps
The website launch is pending as the founder finalizes the product's pricing model. In the meantime, I'm continuing to conduct usability testing to ensure the site is launch-ready when the time comes.