Inner Circle Creator
RASA is a social events platform where the best nights are not just about the party but who you're with. Through research, three personas emerged: the Exclusivity Seeker, the Social Connector, and the Value Maximizer. The Social Connector drove this project, the person who puts their friends on, plans the group chat, and measures a good night by the memories made together. We started with them because they are also RASA's most natural growth engine.
RASA wanted to build a loyalty system that could drive shares, faster sell-outs, and higher in-event spend. But before designing rewards, I needed to understand what the users actually valued. The platform had no social layer and no way to connect people across events. Any loyalty system built on top of that would have had nothing to hold onto.
What do users actually need to feel about RASA before being rewarded means anything to them?
Design the emotional foundation first
The research pointed to one clear first step: give users a way to see and act on their real social connections within RASA. Not followers, not a public social graph — the specific people they'd actually shared a dance floor with.
I designed Your Circle, a dedicated connections hub showing every person a user had attended RASA events with. The shared event count on each row wasn't decorative, it was the emotional anchor. It turns an abstract list of contacts into a record of real experiences together, which is exactly what research showed users respond to.
Make inviting feel like a natural group action, not a task
Research told us users wanted to plan better outings with friends, not broadcast events publicly. "If I know who's going, I can plan better." The design had to match that intent.
I built the invite flow around batch selection. Users compose their list, then send. A persistent floating CTA holds the count as they select, mirroring how people actually think about inviting a group. We created a flow that works in both directions: starting from your people, or starting from an event page.
Remove what research said didn't work
As important as what I designed was what I cut. Early concepts included Following and Followers tabs inside the social hub, and public-facing status indicators. Research was clear: users don't want to display their loyalty or browse a public social graph in this context. "They're my rewards — why would I want to show them?"
I removed both. Following and Followers moved to profile pages where they made contextual sense. The invite surface stayed focused on people you actually know — making it a planning tool, not a social performance.
This project changed how the team thought about the loyalty roadmap. The research finding — that group experience drives loyalty more than any perk — reframed what needed to be built first. Your Circle wasn't a social feature added alongside a rewards system. It was the precondition for one. The handoff included full flows for mobile and desktop, all states and edge cases, a mini spec, and a strategic recommendation to the PM: build the emotional layer before the points layer, or the points won't stick.
