Background
Netwrking.com came out of the strangest period in recent memory. During the 2020–21 lockdowns, professionals still needed to meet people; the platform put like-minded business owners into a group video session, then paired them off at timed intervals for short one-to-ones. Speed dating, essentially, but for finding your next client or collaborator.
My job was to wireframe and design a properly professional UI for it, including a token system for messaging people you’d met in the group sessions, and user profiles you could review before and after events.
The work
Two things made this one a challenge.
First, the backend platform was new to me, with limitations I had to learn the hard way. Uncomfortable, honestly, but that discomfort forced a lot of testing throughout the process, and the solutions we landed on were better for it.
Second, the product had an unusual constraint: no fold. The experience had to fit entirely on screen for every device larger than a mobile, with nothing important hiding below the viewport. My answer was a modular panel layout where each panel scrolls within itself. That kind of layout makes you honest about screen real estate. Every panel has to justify its size, and balance stops being a nicety and becomes the whole job.
The result
Netwrking’s development team got a design system they could implement without guesswork, and their customers got a feature-rich web experience that stays easy to use. The zero-fold idea, which sounded like a limitation at the start, ended up being the thing that made the product feel different.