Cleaning up PurpleTie to make their laundry service seamless again
Summary
PurpleTie provides on demand and at work laundry servicing 400+ Bay Area companies with 10,000+ active users. As the Design Lead, I co-led and designed alongside our team of 6 to redesign their mobile app, which hasn’t had a makeover since 2020.
This project is currently under development and set to be launched in app by the end of 2025.
Executed a 0-1 mobile iOS redesign, building a full design system and collaborating with our developers, tech leads, and PurpleTie’s Strategic Project Manager to enable users to seamlessly onboard, place and manage laundry orders, view service offerings, and manage their PurpleTie account.
Read the case study ↓
Context
Discovery
Getting to know PurpleTie
To get us acquainted, we each did a product walkthrough noting steps that we naturally took physically and mentally as first time users. Together we built a user flow, pinpointing areas of confusion.
Current state
Diving deeper
To know why it felt so confusing we did direct design analyses. and found that the current design was suffering from cluttered layout, outdated design, poor contextual relevance, and misleading copy.
People PROBLEMS
For people, confusion turned into mistrust
We conducted 10 usability testing video interviews using the think-aloud method to clearly understand their interactions in the virtual setting. The word “confused” came up over 70 times here’s why:
🧭
Messy navigation
Small tap targets, disappearing buttons, and unhelpful copy made simple tasks feel perplexing
🧐
Obscured information
Users couldn’t find clear pricing, service, or company details – the main must-knows to trust a business
🦴
Bare bones design
Cluttered layouts, tiny text, lack of hierarchy, and default design styles made people question if it was a scam
IDEATION
How might we make PurpleTie feel legit?
We brainstormed how to solve our people problems, first analyzing how competitors handled smooth onboarding, intuitive ordering, comprehensive order tracking, and polished visual design. Pulling inspiration from what did and didn’t work, we redefined our user flows to include pricing transparency, service clarity, and contextual relevance — then tested them through Crazy 8 sketching.
Competitive analysis
Reimagined flows
Crazy 8 sketches
Structure
After reviewing our brainstorming, we solidified the app anatomy and supporting elements, divvying up responsibilities across them:
Onboarding - account registration that builds service and app familiarity
Home - central navigation hub (hey this is mine!)
Orders - place orders, view current orders, and view past orders with invoice
Services - service descriptions and pricing (hey this is mine!)
Settings - where everything from laundry preferences to payment info can be found
Design system - comprehensive component library built from scratch to ensure consistency, enable reusability, and streamline developer handoffs
→
While I organized the project to give the designers section ownership, collaboration was constant throughout the process. In addition to designing Home and Services, as a lead, I worked closely with designers individually and as a team, guided unification efforts, and ensured cross-functional alignment.
Iteration
Making services and pricing clear
Research established that obscured services and pricing information was a major driver of mistrust, so I set out to rebuild it.
🤝
Uniting services and pricing
Originally, service offerings, service model overview (“how PurpleTie works”), and pricing were scattered across separate pages within a web pop-up
Initially, I brought all three of them together so people could clearly understand what they were paying for, how it worked, and how much it costed them
→
Cognitive overload!
All the different information made it still feel scattered, just on one page instead. I pivoted and found ways to break up the information in ways that provides people with the information they need when they need it.
ℹ️
Info button pop-up
↔️
Toggle views
On the services page, I created a toggle to reduce cognitive load by minimizing to one service per page
Chunking by service type makes pricing information more digestible and lets people access only the information they need
Bringing it home
PurpleTie’s original home page kicked off the ordering process. I redesigned it as a home base, surfacing essentials for users at every stage and simplifying navigation for starting, tracking, or reviewing orders.
🤝
Orders overview
ℹ️
@Work service schedules
People with @Work accounts have a set schedule for pick-ups and drop-offs
Keeping the service schedule on the home page clearly provides essential information at a glance for a seamless laundry experience (figuratively).
Design System
Taking the design from bare bones to fully fledged
The original design had people wondering if PurpleTie was a real business. We built a comprehensive design system that made the design look as legit as the service itself and to have:
Cohesion - ensuring pages are consistent despite being designed by multiple people
Sustainability - equip PurpleTie with assets and guidelines they can use confidently for years
Streamlined implementation - giving context and comprehension to our designs for developers
Prototype
Try PurpleTie out for yourself!
Development
Consistent feedback cycles and quick iteration
The project was structured to be agile; as our team designed, the dev team was simultaneously working in sprint cycles to implement our designs. We had weekly meetings, but we also kept a constant stream of comments, texts, and clarifications going to ensure alignment in viability, iOS requirements, and stakeholder vision.
→
Our structure worked great for designers but didn’t meet the needs of the developers.
Each designer owned their section moving linearly from lo-fi to mid-fi, quickly versioning by implementing feedback on the whole. For the dev team, it meant there weren’t finished features ready for sprints. I realized we needed to adjust structure and build in clearer organization.
Feature tracking
In addition to encouraging designers to target complete features and pages instead of entire section, I created a sheet for them to track it.
This was beneficial for everyone and significantly improved cross-functional collaboration. The Product Manager knew what to assign for sprints, developers knew who they could contact if they needed clarification, the client knew what was awaiting their approval, designers knew what features they needed to work on, and I was able to manage more effectively with a clearer bird’s-eye-view of progress.
Feature tracker
Detailed hi-fi flows
Reflection
Lessons learned
At times, client requests clashed with research findings. Initially, I was explaining design decisions from a technical UX perspective, a foreign language to my client. Instead, I learned to translate user needs in terms of client priorities so user advocacy could be a point of alignment not friction.
I also learned the impact of having high standards for organization and communication. Apoorva (co-lead) and I provided our designers with clear meeting agendas, file navigation, and deliverables, setting them up to easily meet the standard and succeed. I noticed a momentum loop beginning to form; their successes gave them self-confidence which motivated them and built momentum. For me, this was a huge win. Not only were we operating efficiently and exceeding client expectations, but my designers ended the project feeling proud of themselves and how much they had grown.