VeYou

Lead Product Designer at Tooploox · Dec 2025 – Jul 2026 · iOS & Android
Client: Tommy Harper, Hollywood producer

I led product design for VeYou from first concept through launch, a global rollout and months of iteration after it. That meant the design team, the design system and the UI, and also shaping scope with the client and setting the direction for how the app handles money, brand and growth.

Context

Tommy came to us with a clear ambition: a micro-drama app that could actually work for US and European audiences. The category was exploding, but every major app was built for Asian markets, with patterns that feel foreign to Western users. He wanted something different. Premium, not pushy. Clear, not cluttered.

The problem with existing apps

We audited more than a dozen apps. The micro-drama side included ReelShort, ShortMax, My Drama and iQIYI. The streaming side included Netflix, Apple TV, HBO Max, Prime Video, Hulu and Tubi, to understand what makes a streaming experience feel trustworthy. I didn't just browse the competitors. I paid for them, to see how their monetization really works.

The patterns were consistent, and consistently alienating:

Casino-style monetization borrowed from apps like Temu or AliExpress. Hidden costs, bait subscriptions, and balances drained by episodes that unlock automatically without telling you. Interfaces overloaded with prompts to spend.

There was a structural gap too. Series pages, players and navigation felt borrowed from an older era of mobile design, and nothing felt intentional.

That gave us the brief: keep what works in micro-drama (addictive short-form content, strong engagement loops) and combine it with the clarity and craft of Western streaming. It also made the real risk clear. Pressure patterns exist because they convert. So the goal was never just to look premium. It was to make spending feel fair enough that people come back and spend again.

Scope

The early vision was big: live comments floating over episodes, a rewards system, several monetization experiments, reviews and a personalized For You feed. People changed on both the client side and ours during the project, and each new voice pushed a different feature set into the MVP.

I researched the heavy features properly, then used that work to argue several of them out of the release. Floating comments and reward mechanics were exactly the clutter we had positioned against. I won some of those arguments and the client won others. The MVP shipped focused on the core watch loop, without long delays, and the deferred features stayed documented for later.

Key design decisions

Liquid Glass as the foundation. I proposed Apple's Liquid Glass design language for iOS, with a consistent counterpart on Android. It wasn't just a visual choice. Liquid Glass brings real UX patterns around layering, depth and contextual UI, which suit a video-first product where controls have to sit over content without competing with it. The client chose it after reviewing alternative directions, and it became the base of the whole design system.

A series page that sells with the story, not the UI. Micro-drama series pages are usually static and packed with information. I designed ours around a trailer playing in the background behind a clean information layer, closer to Apple TV than to the category. Cast, episodes and details are all reachable without clutter, and the hero reacts to scroll so the page feels alive without getting noisy.

A player built on hundreds of small decisions. A video app lives or dies by its player. I worked through timing and state: how quickly controls fade, what happens at the end of an episode and at the end of a series, and how locked, unlocked and rented content changes the UI. This work is invisible when it's done well and obvious when it isn't.

Working on a video app means handling a long tail of edge cases. How fast should player controls disappear? What happens at the end of a series? How does access state affect the UI? Each is a small decision, but there are hundreds of them, and they compound.

Monetization: losing one argument, winning another. I pushed for subscriptions from the start. If VeYou was going to be the Netflix of micro-drama, the business model was the clearest way to stand apart. The business chose differently. V1 launched with series rentals, which suited a catalog of around 15 shows, and later moved to popcorns, a virtual currency spent to unlock episodes. Research showed that virtual currency is what users in this category already understand. I agreed, and put my effort into how the currency behaves:

• Auto-unlock off by default. Every competitor I paid for had it on and silent. In VeYou, users turn it on themselves, and the option appears when they unlock an episode. This was my call, and it shipped.

• A top-up sheet, not a paywall. Running out mid-series is a refill moment. The sheet opens over the player, so the next episode stays in view.

• A wallet you can read. The transaction history splits into All, Top-ups and Spent, which matches how people think about a balance.

We still used standard techniques to encourage purchases. The line I held was that nothing charges a user without them knowing.

Getting the brand to work inside the product. The external agency's first rebrand was made without design involvement. It put high-saturation gradients over every screen, including the shop, wallet and settings. It worked as a presentation, but it hurt usability and undercut the premium positioning. For the second round, I made myself part of the process:

• I redesigned the shop and settings myself to show where brand energy works and where the UI has to stay functional.

• I set out what the product needed from the brand, and reviewed the agency's proposals early.

• I showed how their vision could live inside our UI without engineering rebuilding the app.

The result is on-brand, usable, and didn't force development to redo shipped screens. I then consolidated everything into one source of truth for iOS and Android, including accessibility fixes the new palette required.

Navigation that grows with the product. VeYou launched without bottom navigation, because a small feature set didn't need one. As the roadmap grew, I worked with the client's product owner to decide what earned a place in the main navigation. We introduced it with Wallet temporarily holding the future For You slot, because changing navigation after users have learned it costs far more than a placeholder tab.

How I led

I led design on the project, and a second designer joined partway through. I set up how we worked: design reviews, how we split and tracked tasks, the handoff process with engineering, and a shared design system across iOS and Android. My frontend background let me spec interactions and edge cases in terms developers could build directly, which cut a lot of back-and-forth. On the roadmap, I shaped prioritization with the product owner, who made the final calls.

Results

From launch on 10 April to 24 September 2026:

~16.5K installs · 48% of buyers bought again · 8x revenue after coins launched · 0 refunds

When coins replaced series passes on 13 July, the business model started working. Revenue in the first full month was eight times the launch month. Nearly half of buyers came back for a second pack, and one in five bought three or more. There were no refunds. For a product built on the bet that fair spending brings people back, repeat purchases were the number I cared about most.

The top-up sheet worked at the moment of intent: 24% of users who ran out of popcorn started a purchase. Only 9% completed one. Part of that gap was technical, because one Android release broke every purchase until it was hotfixed. The rest is the first place I'd look next.

The product converted, but reach was the problem. The App Store page turned 7.5% of visitors into downloads, but only had about 340 visits a day.

What I'd do differently

Price packs in episodes, not coins. My transparency work covered how spending happens: no silent unlocks and no surprise charges. It didn't cover what a pack is worth. The most-upvoted Google Play review asked exactly that: what does 2,000 popcorn for $19.99 actually get you? Next time, every pack would show how many episodes it buys.

Build a free path from day one. After coins launched, every negative review said the same thing: everything is behind a paywall. Users asked for ad-supported unlocks, and several asked for an unlimited subscription, the model I had argued for. A daily free episode or ad-supported unlocks would have softened the paywall. They're also the strongest growth mechanic a content app has.

Design growth into the product. Users who found VeYou liked it, but not enough people found it. Distribution isn't only marketing's job. Next time I'd push for growth mechanics in v1: shareable clips, referral rewards, and cliffhangers that travel outside the app.

Make research too small to decline. I proposed testing during the build and the client chose speed. A handful of unmoderated sessions on the unlock flow would have cost days and been hard to turn down.

Set brand guardrails before the agency starts. Defining functional rules upfront would have saved a full round of rework.

Status

My engagement ended in July 2026, when the client scaled down ahead of a new investment round.