The Emotional Reboot
The evolution of Kibit from a summaries app that felt academic into an emotional, immersive experience, without ceasing to be a reader and audio library.
The evolution of “Kibit — Big ideas, in minutes.” There I built it from the ground up; here I made it grow.
Challenge
The challenge
Kibit was already launched and working book summaries to read or listen to in about ten minutes. But its visual language didn't match its content. The content is emotional relationships, anxiety, personal growth yet the clear, editorial, text-heavy interface made it feel like you were about to do “self-help homework,” not something that gets you. Discovery was by category, detail screens asked you to read a lot to decide, and onboarding felt like a form.
Objective
The objective
Reposition the experience without changing what the app is:
- Align the visual language to the user's emotional state.
- Redesign discovery to be immersive and emotion-led, not category-led.
- Rethink monetization as a contextual system, not a stray paywall.
Role
I led the redesign end to end
Role: Lead UX/UI · Product Designer. Timeline & tools: 3 months · Figma · Illustrator · Photoshop · Google AI Studio · Claude · Gemini.
Strategy
The repositioning from “study task” to emotional experience.
UX / IA
Redesign of onboarding, discovery and monetization flows.
UI
New dark visual system + emotional photography.
System
Full mapping of the blocking / paywall touchpoints.
The pivot
From studying to feeling
Personal growth isn't consumed like a school subject it's consumed through identification and emotional pull. That idea guided the whole redesign: the interface had to evoke the mood instantly and lower the decision load, instead of asking you to read to find out whether something is for you.
In practice, three moves: dark mode + photography for intimacy, discovery by emotion (not category), and monetization that earns the paywall instead of imposing it.
The redesign
Before / after, screen by screen
Onboarding
Before: form-style questions with flat illustrations and a generic stepper, it felt like an academic test. After: a flow that starts from real pain (“We're all going through something: difficult relationships, anxiety…”), validates the emotion before asking for data, shows the value (experts, content) and only asks you to create an account at the end. It finishes by assembling your personalized “locked” content, a natural bridge to the paywall.
Home / Discovery
Before: light background, square book-style covers, text lists (“The 10 summaries you need to read”). Discovery by category. After: immersive discovery. An emotional hero, a Top 10 row as social proof, and rails curated by mood and moment (“Audiobooks to heal,” “For listening in the car,” “If you can't afford therapy, listen to this”). Vertical, cinematic covers and a persistent mini-player.
Content (read / listen)
Before: tapping a cover led to a preview screen holding all the content information synopsis, “what's it about?”, chapters and only from there could the user choose to open the reader or activate the player, two separate flows depending on the action. After: tapping any content opens directly into the player, which starts in autoplay. Reading is one tap away via “Read,” and the information that used to live in the preview now sits behind the “···” menu, available but no longer in the way. The decision prioritizes consumption over exploration, encouraging users to start listening or reading right away.
Monetization (the blocking map)
Before: transactional paywalls that shouted the price (“70% OFF”) with generic vectors. After: a system of contextual paywalls one for each moment of the journey (post-profiling, inside content, gift, single purchase, full access, Premium from the profile) all with a value narrative (“It's your moment to evolve”) over cinematic photography. To get there, I mapped the whole journey in a “blocking map” that shows every conversion point and how you reach it system design, not stray screens.
Visual system
A new language: dark, photographic, cinematic
I moved from a light, illustrated scheme to dark mode with high-impact emotional photography and vertical, movie-poster-style covers. The same brand orange stayed as an accent over the dark background. The photography and covers were generated with AI (Google AI Studio, Claude, Gemini) and refined in Photoshop, for a coherent, custom visual world without stock imagery. The result: an intimate, comfortable space to consume in moments of vulnerability the app feels close and personal, not like a manual.
Outcome
From feeling like studying to feeling like something that gets you
The redesign fully repositions Kibit: the same summaries app in reader and audio, but with an emotional, immersive experience that meets the user's state from the first second. Onboarding, discovery, content and monetization, redesigned as one coherent system.
What I learned: a redesign isn't makeup it's aligning the form with what the product really is. Kibit's content was always emotional; the work was making the interface finally say it. And thinking about monetization as a mapped system (not a stray paywall) is as much design as any screen.
Repositioned
From feeling academic to feeling emotional and close.
Redesigned
Onboarding, home, content and paywalls as one system.
Systematized
A blocking map that orders the whole monetization.