Every customer conversation, in one place.
- Brand & Product Design
- Web app
- Year: 2024
Circle is a customer engagement platform that brings a business’s conversations from email, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and X into one shared inbox. Teams can reply, turn messages into tickets, run campaigns and surveys, and see how it’s all performing, without jumping between apps.
Project facts
- Role
- Brand & Product Designer
- Client
- Circle
- Location
- Nigeria
- Timeline
- Contract
Problem*
Growing businesses talk to customers everywhere: DMs, comments, mentions, emails, WhatsApp. Each channel lives in its own app, so messages get missed, two teammates answer the same person, and nobody can see what’s been resolved. Feedback that should drive the business ends up scattered across tabs. Circle needed an MVP that could pull all of this together, and a brand that could earn the trust of businesses before the product had any track record.
My Approach*
1. Give the brand a voice before the product had users.
Circle was launching into a market of established tools, so the brand had to signal credibility from day one. I built the identity around a confident blue, a warm green accent and real people in the imagery, so it felt dependable without being cold.
The early-access website was the first test of that brand: a page for each core capability, from the shared inbox to analytics and campaigns, each paired with a product preview, and a clear sign-up path for early access. Designed for desktop and mobile, it did the selling while the product was still being built.
2. Design the inbox as the home, and everything else around it.
The shared inbox is where teams spend their day, so I designed it first and let it set the rules for the rest of the product. Every connected channel sits in one sidebar, conversations open in a single familiar chat view, and social messages can be filtered by DMs, posts, mentions and comments.
From any message, a teammate can create a ticket, assign it and keep the thread going with comments, so a customer question moves from “seen” to “solved” without leaving the screen.
3. Make a large product feel small.
The MVP scope was wide: onboarding and team invites, a dashboard, campaigns across SMS, email and social, surveys with response analytics, customer records, ticketing, reports and a full settings area.
I kept it manageable with one layout system, a shared sidebar, consistent tables and forms, and in-app guides that walk new users through their first setup. Light and dark modes and a mobile layout came from the same component set, so the product grew without becoming harder to learn.
Results*
I delivered Circle’s brand, marketing site and the complete MVP product design, from sign-up to subscription settings, covering [X] screens across nine modules. The MVP launched successfully, and multiple brands and their users were onboarded onto the platform in its first phase. The visual language and layout system I set up became the foundation the product has continued to build on.