NETTLA SOCIAL SHIPPING SOCIAL FEATURES AT STARTUP SPEED
Nettla's app had been optimised around what clubs wanted. Players wanted something else: friends, stats, messaging, and a feed to tie it together. I joined as a freelance product designer to repair the design system and ship those features fast, without the luxury of A/B tests and long investigations.
Club home, social feed and about, inside one club's own branded app. The booking tool became somewhere players come back to between games.
Nettla is a startup building a white-label platform for racket sport bookings: padel, tennis, pickleball and squash. It is an alternative to the big booking marketplaces: instead of listing on someone else's platform, clubs get their own branded app and keep full control of their brand and their customer data.
An app built for clubs, and players asking for something it wasn't.
Nettla had spent a long time optimising the app around what the clubs wanted. The players were now asking for something different: friends, stats, messaging, and a social feed that pulled it all together.
The product had also been shipping for a period without a designer on the team. Components had drifted apart, screens no longer hung together, and features the product owners considered important were reaching players in a form that didn't do them justice.
Components that had drifted apart while the product shipped without a designer.
Every component sorted into keep as-is, modify, or build new, before drawing anything.
Process is a tool, not an end in itself.
Before opening Figma to draw anything new, I went through the existing design system component by component: what could be reused as-is, what could be modified to support the new features, and where I would need to build something entirely new that still felt native to the library. That gave me a foundation to build on, instead of adding another layer on top of the drift.
- Talked to the product owners about what they actually needed. They knew they wanted a friends feature, but had no clear picture of how it should be presented or how it should work in practice.
- Was upfront about the risk of designing quickly without testing, so we could decide together where it was worth putting the effort and where “good enough” was genuinely fine.
- Built every new feature as a complete flow in Figma, then walked developers and decision-makers through it before anything got built.
- Used the Figma agent and loaded Nettla's design system into Claude Design to iterate on ideas quickly, combined with manual design work.
- Tested each feature once developers had it running in the dev app, gave feedback, and flagged anything needing more polish to the product owner so we could prioritise together: what was worth the time, and what could wait.
The feature the product owners wanted but couldn't yet picture. Designed as a full flow before a line of code.
The thread that ties bookings, results and friends into one place worth opening.
The club's own front page inside its own branded app.
Close to 10,000 friendships in two months.
~10,000
Unique friendships created on the platform in roughly two months, counted by Nettla's own development team. The first 24 hours produced between 1,500 and 2,000 of them, and the product owner reported that Friends had already become the most-used feature in the app's history.
Friends, Social Feed and Club Home are all live in the official Nettla app today.
In my final weeks I also produced ad creative for the App Store and Google Play, and worked on improvements across the admin tool and other parts of the player app.
The last stretch: ad creative for both stores, built from the same system.