Danceflavors
Redesigning a Complex Dance Platform
Danceflavors connects dancers, teachers and dance schools through courses, workshops, events and community features.
As the product grew, its web and mobile experiences became inconsistent and difficult to navigate. I redesigned the core experience with clearer structure and a more consistent cross-platform system.
Role
End-to-End UX Designer
Duration
6 months
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Teams
Problem to solve
Users struggled to navigate Danceflavors and complete key actions across web and mobile.
Solution
A redesigned web and mobile experience built around clearer navigation, simplified user flows and a shared visual system, making the platform easier to understand and more consistent across its core features.
Final design
Background
Danceflavors brings several experiences into one product: discovering classes and events, buying tickets, managing courses, connecting with other dancers and communicating with the community.
But those experiences had evolved without a consistent system behind them. Web and mobile behaved differently, similar components looked and worked differently across screens, and some important flows required unnecessary steps.
The redesign started with a broader question:
How can we make a complex platform feel simpler and more consistent without losing the range of things users can do?
Homepage before redesign.
Research
User personas
I grouped the findings into two personas representing the main user types.
1:1 interviews
I interviewed 7 dancers from different backgrounds to understand their goals and behaviours.
Competitor analysis
I reviewed similar platforms to identify common patterns, gaps and opportunities for Danceflavors.
User journey mapping
I mapped the experience of discovering and joining dance activities to identify pain points.
What we found
Personas
User journey map
Define
The research shifted the redesign away from simply modernising the interface.
The bigger opportunity was to reduce friction across the product while creating a system that could work consistently across web and mobile. We focused the redesign around three principles:
Make discovery more direct: Reduce the number of decisions between arriving on the platform and finding something relevant.
Create consistency across the product: Use shared patterns and components instead of treating every screen as an isolated experience.
Design mobile as a core experience: Adapt flows and hierarchy to smaller screens rather than simply translating the desktop interface.
How might we…
How might we make Danceflavors easier to explore and navigate while creating a consistent experience across web and mobile.
Ideation
Design started on paper, sketching layout options for the homepage, event pages, and search before moving into Figma. This made it faster to compare structural ideas without getting stuck on visual details too early.
Alongside this, a design system was built to standardize components, type, and color, directly solving the inconsistency problem and setting the baseline every later screen followed.
Design
Starting with structure, not UI
I started by sketching the core screens on paper, exploring different ways of organising information before committing to a visual direction. Working at low fidelity made it easier to compare alternatives quickly and focus on hierarchy, navigation and content rather than visual details.
Building a shared visual language
The existing product used different styles and patterns across screens. As part of the redesign, I created a shared visual system for typography, colour, buttons, inputs, cards and other recurring components.
This gave web and mobile a common foundation and made new screens easier to design consistently.
Key improvements
01 / DISCOVERABILITY
Making discovery more direct
The old experience asked users to choose a location and category before showing results. The redesigned experience surfaces results and available categories earlier, reducing the number of decisions needed to start exploring Danceflavors.
02 / EVENTS
Giving events a clearer hierarchy
Event pages had to communicate a lot at once: what the event is, where it takes place, who's organising it and how to attend. The redesign reorganised that information around the decisions users need to make, while introducing useful context such as maps and co-host information.
03 / TICKETING
Simplifying the path to checkout
Ticket selection previously happened inside a dialog, limiting space and making the next step less clear. We moved the experience to a dedicated page, simplified the available actions and created two clear paths: continue with an account or continue as a guest.
04 / DANCE SCHOOL ONBOARDING
Breaking a complex setup into manageable steps
Creating a dance school profile originally relied on a long form with little context about what information was needed or why. We replaced it with a step-by-step flow, breaking the setup into smaller decisions and giving users clearer feedback on their progress.
05 / COMMUNITY
Creating a more cohesive community experience
Danceflavors isn't only a booking platform. Profiles and messaging also help dancers connect with each other. We redesigned these areas using the same visual language as the rest of the product, with clearer profile information, simplified controls and a more focused messaging experience.
Results
The redesign established a shared foundation for Danceflavors across web and mobile.
Core flows such as discovery, event browsing, ticket selection and dance school setup were simplified, while a shared design system brought previously disconnected parts of the product into one consistent experience.
The work also created a foundation that could continue evolving as new features were added to the platform.
Final Thoughts
01
A redesign isn't just a visual update.
What initially looked like an outdated interface was also a problem of structure, navigation and consistency. Fixing the UI alone wouldn't have solved that.
02
Consistency becomes more important as products grow.
When features are designed independently, small differences quickly add up. Building shared patterns made the product easier to understand and gave future work a stronger foundation.
03
Mobile needs its own decisions.
Simply translating desktop screens to a smaller viewport isn't enough. Designing around mobile constraints helped expose unnecessary steps and simplify several flows.
04
Start with hierarchy before visual polish.
Sketching early helped separate structural problems from visual ones and made it easier to explore alternatives before investing in high-fidelity design.
