Octopii Social — A Rescue Mission
Videos still incoming — in the meantime I encourage you to give Octopii Social a download. I put immense effort into polishing every nook and cranny. It’s deceptively simple, yet the most advanced social platform ever designed — besides the algorithm/monetization aspect, which is intentionally omitted from the UX. Octopii Social is an app for friends, and sharing your part of the world — not for getting rich or building a following. That said, on a long enough timeline I’d expect to see free subscriptions for top contributors.
The mobile app
Below is just a screenshot dump while I work on my individual feature breakdowns. There is not a single feature or detail in any of these screenshots which wasn’t designed and/or built by myself, often with Claude’s help.
Admin & Ops Panel
Tap the button below to launch the live demo version of the dashboard!
I was responsible for every aspect of this dashboard, from initial design to the live demo available below. I’m using the same infrastructure as the Octopii platform, along with Anthropic’s Platform SDK to deliver the Ollie assistant experience. Get in there and start having some fun! There’s a token cap, so spend ‘em wisely! Note: The dashboard works on mobile, but isn’t fully optimized.
I.A. & System Design
Tap the button below to launch the Claude Artifact!
These are engineering-adjacent flows rather than the UX flows (more on that below, and later). I don’t see barriers or territory lines when it comes to product design — we all have our strengths, but I feel everyone should endeavor to understand the product and empathize with their teammates’ unique challenges. It only makes us better individual contributors, and better teammates as a whole. This touches on another aspect of the tech industry which I’m not particularly fond of — hyper-specialization. The same inherent qualities which make each of us great at specific disciplines most usually have a lot of overlap — we should be hiring for those inherent qualities, rather than a specialist title. As they say, the most diverse teams produce the most innovative output — and I see no reason why that wouldn’t be true for each of us on an individual basis. When we become familiar, or even fluent, in adjacent disciplines, we unlock yet another door on the long path of development.
Summary
Solving one of the world’s biggest problems
More than a decade has passed since we’ve begun acknowledging social media has its problems — from the pressure to perform and lack of authenticity, to bot accounts and fake content — there is no shortage of puzzles to solve in modern day social media.
A giant ambiguous puzzle with the potential to substantially improve the world? Just my cup of tea.
I founded and built Octopii LLC from the ground up — leading the creation of the Octopii Social platform, from jotting down the first notes all the way to launch day. I owned the product vision and strategy, UX/UI design, and end-to-end execution, contributing to virtually all functions including 600,000+ lines of code, AI workflows, user research, product management, recruiting, and team leadership.
I conducted interviews, market research, and pored over surveys and studies from around the world to better understand the key challenges in modern social platforms, and translated those insights into world-first design solutions. Combined, those solutions comprise Octopii Social.
Octopii isn’t perfect.
As they say, software is never complete — well, in Octopii’s case, that could not be more true. I’ve cataloged over 50 improvements and fixes yet to be made to the UX/UI. Virtually every aspect of Octopii’s current release, and indeed every other design touchpoint (web, stores, etc.) are the first few iterations.
Disclaimers aside, I am immensely proud of what I and the team accomplished, and it is my honor to have had the opportunity to give the world the gift of a social platform which returns us to our roots, free of all of the ailments of modern day social media. Give it a download and help save social media!
Your Social Sidekick
Octopii wasn’t intended to just be a revolutionary social app — it also had grand plans to utilize the power of an AI companion to assist in finding and maintaining friendships.
I’m sure we’ve all noticed a sharp decline in the number of posts we see from friends, and a large part of that is the introduction of short form video coupled with autoplay — most people are opening these apps to essentially channel surf, rather than make social connections. That said, I felt, and still feel, a social companion aware of your digital social life, interests, personality, interwoven with all other users’ social lives, could teach us all how to be friends on the internet once again. We didn’t receive the investment to launch Ollie, but it is a concept which I hope to see released by someone else someday. (I’m sure it’s not far away.)
Ollie was to be a friend in every user’s pocket, checking in when it makes sense — asking how their day is going, offering support, encouragement, and understanding, while also suggesting new friends and activities based on their location, interactions, personality, and interests.
Ollie would facilitate the cultivation of new relationships with double opt-in friend suggestions, both local and afar, initiating get-to-know-you games, and offering pro-social engagement loops. The same dynamics would apply to pre-existing relationships, suggesting virtual and physical activities, relationship nudges, auto-scheduling, gifting of virtual goods, and ultimately, elevating our relationships in ways we never anticipated.
Brand Gradients
I’m very happy with how Octopii’s logo turned out, and I conducted quite a bit of user research on this — I wanted Octopii to be unique and standout from the crowd of competitors. It came down to Beach Sunset and Cotton Candy — younger respondents preferred Beach Sunset, while adults generally preferred Cotton Candy. I really liked them both, but agreed the visual harmony and aquatic vibes of Cotton Candy was the best option.
Onboarding
Below are the onboarding screens I authored for v1 of Octopii Social — I wish I had more time to work on these, they’re just about the bare minimum I could get away with while handling all other responsibilities, i.e. Coding, Leadership, UI/UX, Recruiting, Outreach, Marketing, Community Management — you name it, I did it.
Homepage — A little 90’s Nostalgia
Below is the homepage for Octopii Social — the targeted audience was largely Gen Z and Millennials; I endeavored to tap into 90’s nostalgia, something I think we’re all feeling on some level. I wish I had more time to make these cohesive (for example, the private threads illustration looks nothing like the others) — but when the app needs dozens of upgrades and fixes, you tend to focus your efforts on the product rather than going beyond good-enough for marketing efforts.
Wireframe — version 0.1
Below is the initial global wireframe for Octopii Social, it does bring back memories! So many aspects never made it to development, but that is the nature of the journey between Figma and the App Store. Concessions were made due to all manner of constraints, and improvements were made where necessary. The initial design didn’t even have a public feed or map view, which is a massive part of the UX of Octopii Social these days.