CURATA
Cross-medium creative canvas that maps a user’s aesthetic ‘DNA.’
Jacqueline Flynn
Nicole Luu
Sarah Edwards
Nupur Gorkar
Yuri Yang
Team
Product Designer
UX Researcher
Role
Jan 2026 — May 2026
Duration
Figma
FigJam
After Effects
Tools
CONTEXT
We collect everything, but at the same time, understand nothing.
Young creatives today move fluidly across mediums — saving films on Letterboxd, pinning visuals on Pinterest, building playlists on Spotify — but each platform only knows one version of them. Inspiration accumulates in silos, driven by algorithms optimized for engagement.
The result is a generation that consumes more than ever and struggles to articulate what actually resonates with them and explaining why. The feeling exists: that pull toward certain colours, textures, moods, references, but there's no unified place designed to help a user read it.
Make your tastes and aesthetics visible.
Curata helps you turn scattered inspirations into a picture of who you are creatively. By bringing together the media, colors, words, and ideas you gravitate toward, you can recognize and explore your own aesthetic.
OVERVIEW
RESEARCH
The continuous loop by design
Based on 16 literature reviews, we found that doomscrolling isn't laziness. Research shows it's a conditioned response where the brain seeks resolution that the feed is designed never to provide.
We wanted to find participants that this problem space spoke to:
60+ survey responses
Found through UW clubs, creative subreddits, and design Discord communities.
16 user interviews
Ages 18—26
Active across 3+ creative platforms
HMW STATEMENT
How might we help users map their aesthetic identity across mediums to enable intentional discovery and transform passive consumption into creative action?
The endless scrolling mixed with that specific frustration of not finding what’s in my head. When the search feels more like a chore than a creative spark, it definitely does more harm than good.
Interview participant, content creator
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Understanding existing apps to build a middle ground
Most platforms make you choose: search with intent or surrender to the algorithm. We wanted to find the middle ground: a tool that learns from what you save, but keeps you in control of what it means.
People know something is missing, they just don't have the words or the tools for it yet. Across 16 interviews, four main pain points resurfaced consistently:
User Curation
Manual & Intentional
What works:
User sets the intent
Collections
Pain points:
Only finds what you’re searching for
Saves pile up
Algorithmic Discovery
Behavioural & Automated
What works:
Serendipitous discovery
Cross-medium reach
Pain points:
Infinite scroll, no stopping point
Algorithm decides your identity
Algorithmic Discovery
Behavioural & Automated
What works:
Serendipitous discovery
Cross-medium reach
Pain points:
Infinite scroll, no stopping point
Algorithm decides your identity
Middle Ground
Search by aesthetic
User-taught
Personalization
User decides when to stop
75%
navigate 2+ platforms
before finding what
they’re looking for
Fragmentation
18%
actually know what they’re searching for when they open an app
Intentionality
41%
prefer to browse and see what catches their eye first
Discovery
KEY FINDINGS & INSIGHTS
What people collect and where it breaks down
Mapping the core user journey
Before diving into wireframes, we mapped out the full user journey to align on key decision points from how someone enters the app to how their taste profile builds over time.
Exploring the different features that our app could align with
Our team started off with a whiteboarding session where we threw out ideas, questions, and reactions about the problem space. The goal of this wasn't to solve anything yet, instead I wanted to get everything out of our heads, so we could see where our thinking overlapped.
IDEATION
Our central idea started with a textbox
We hypothesized that giving users a free-form prompt — "Type a vibe, feeling, or concept" — would be the most intuitive entry point. But when we tested this with a small group of users, a pattern emerged quickly: people froze. Describing your feeling from scratch with no visual reference is harder than it sounds.
EARLY DESIGN DECISIONS
Our FigJam board
Early sketches
User journey map
Designing around recognition
Once we shifted the entry point, we reworked the core flows around showing rather than asking, letting users respond to content rather than generate words from nothing.
WIREFRAMING
Profile page
When you explore your curated DNA
Your following list
Based on tags, see the collection that corresponds
Stage 4 — Identity/profile
Stage 3 — Wander (explore page)
Collections view
Profile view
Profiles (caught up to date)
When search is pressed
When you click on someone’s profile
Picking media to create collection
Image and video
What the collection looks like when building
Your collections space
Filtering collections by tags
Showing the collection
Stage 2 — Collections and creating
Stage 1 — Onboarding
Learning how to create a collection
Adding media
Based on tags, the identity nodes form
Save the space you made
Create account
Recognition is valued over articulation
People weren't able to think of what to write at the top of their heads. It's difficult to describe taste if you haven't seen anything to correspond with it.
FINAL DESIGN
Introducing Curata: A cross-medium canvas that turns what you save into a picture of who you are.
Curata creates space for collecting across images, films, music, and words — then surfaces the patterns and feelings that connect them, helping you see not just what you love, but what it says about you.
BACK TO TOP
Curata’s branding
Curata’s visual identity
Curata's interface stays refrained by design. Dark base, warm whites, one blue accent because the media is the story we wanted to portray to users. The three-ellipse logo reflects the app's core idea: distinct things overlapping into something new.
VISUAL DESIGN
FLOW 1
Creating a collection
Create from the daily prompt or build from a blank canvas. Users build a space before they fill it — naming it after a mood or memory, then adding images, music, and film as it takes shape.
Video demo
FLOW 2
Your collections
Saved spaces live together, filterable by the tags you've used. Ideas borrowed from other people's boards expire after a set window, pushing inspiration into action instead of letting it pile up.
FLOW 3
Wander
Users explore collections connected by a shared song, film, or tag — surfacing people who see the world similarly, not just what's trending.
nostalgic
that one summer
@username
Contains the same tag
4 images
1 video
1 song
2 tags
Summertime
The Sundays
FLOW 4
Identity profile
As feeling tags accumulate, a DNA profile forms — turning scattered saves into a picture of who you actually are. You can look back at the collections within each "feeling" to remember what each collection meant to you.