Paw Social

Dog owners already post about their pets, just not in a place built for local, dog-shaped connection. Typical social apps treat the human as the primary identity. Meetup tools are generic. Pet apps often stop at profiles or adoption listings.

What’s missing is a single product that combines identity (a dog profile people recognize and follow), social (posts, feelings, comments, friendships), local (map-based discovery of spots and playdates), and realtime messaging so online interest becomes an offline walk.

Make onboarding feel playful without feeling childish. Ship a feed that supports photo posts and distinctive “feeling” posts. Make meetup discovery map-native, not a buried list. Keep web and mobile in parity from day one. Use a real design system: tokens, components, screens, instead of one-off UI.

The visual language is dark-first, with calm charcoal surfaces and mint/leaf accents for action. Brand energy shows up in create CTAs, liked states, feeling cards, and AI “dog voice” moments, not in noisy chrome.

Figma held the full mobile system: navigation, buttons, tabs, inputs, post cards, meetup cards, chips, avatars, typography, and color, then mapped into production tokens and components.

Feelings are first-class content: mood cards with a chip like “[Dog] is feeling happy,” alongside photos and polls. Profiles are dog-centric: cover, avatar, stats, pet-parent cards, and about chips.

Meetups are map-first: markers for spots and events, cards with date and attendance, and one-tap Join. Messaging turns interest into a walk: threads, presence, and a send affordance that matches the brand.

Auth and onboarding gate into a dog-first identity model. The feed covers posts, feelings, polls, likes, and comments. Friendships, suggestions, and find-friends filters make the social graph usable. Meetups support create, RSVP, and map discovery. Chat stays live. Media uploads stay off the critical path. An AI caption rewrite gives posts a playful “dog voice.”

Web and iOS share auth and product APIs so features stay in parity. Social graph and feed data live in a relational store; chat and presence use a realtime layer. After mutations, caches invalidate in a targeted way so the feed stays fast without serving stale social state.

Ownership is resolved server-side for every sensitive action (likes, friendships, RSVPs) so the client never gets to assert “this is my dog” on its own.

Dog as the user. The primary entity is the dog; humans are pet parents attached to that identity. That choice shaped onboarding, the feed, and every permission check.

Feelings as a content type. A light schema change unlocked a completely different card treatment, distinctive in the feed without a separate product surface.

Map-first meetups. List and map share one events model; the map is discovery, the list is for scanning and hosting.

Product taste: dog-first identity, feeling posts, map-native meetups. Systems thinking: shared clients, split data concerns, careful caching. Design ownership: Figma system to tokens to shipped UI. Cross-platform delivery: one product story on web and iOS.