© 2026 Created By Moona
YUV
Designing the digital experience for a smart
hair-colour system
Role: Interaction / Product Designer
Team: Two designers + a development team, working
directly with the client
Timeframe: Jul 2022 - Feb 2024
Platform: iOS app (iPad + mobile) paired with smart dispensing hardware
OVERVIEW
YUV is a subscription-based platform that transforms professional hair colouring by combining a digital app with smart dispensing hardware. It lets stylists build precise colour formulas, save them, re-dispense them consistently, and cut product waste. I worked on the digital experience, turning early design concepts into complete, build ready user journeys, defining how the product should behave in every real world condition, and owning the final project documentation delivered to the client.
Challenge
Professional colour mixing is complex. Stylists juggle intricate formulas, have little visibility of what they mixed last time, and work under real time pressure on the salon floor. The challenge was to design a digital workflow that supported accuracy and speed without interrupting the stylist’s creative flow, and to make sure that workflow held up across every real-world condition, not just the ideal path.
My role
I worked alongside another designer who produced the early, rough concepts. My job was to turn those concepts into something that could actually be built and shipped:
- Mapped raw designs into complete user journeys, covering the full stylist workflow, from client consultation to final formula.
- Defined system states and edge cases, every error, interruption and unexpected input, writing the conditional logic for how the product should behave in each situation.
- Translated journeys into developer specifications, giving engineers a clear, unambiguous blueprint to build from.
- Turned research inputs into design decisions, working from the research the team provided and translating it into interface and flow choices.
- Acted as the link between client and delivery team, joining weekly meetings with the client, developers and managers, translating business needs into design direction and design realities back to the client.
- Owned the final project documentation, gathering each team member’s output, synthesising it into a single coherent report, and adding the analysis and conclusions delivered to the client.
Approach
Working from research inputs. I started from the research and domain inputs the team provided, building an understanding of the stylist’s workflow and where a digital tool could reduce errors and save time.
Mapping the journey. I rebuilt the stylist journey end to end as detailed, conditional user flows, identifying every branch, state and failure point along the way.
Thinking in systems, not screens. Because I owned every condition and not just the happy path, I regularly caught gaps in the original concept: a missing warning, an unhandled state, a path that could silently derail the experience. I designed those missing pieces back in.
Specs and handoff. I turned the finished flows into developer-ready specifications so the build matched the intended experience.
Documentation and delivery. I consolidated the whole team’s work into a single final handover for the client.
Process & scale
This wasn’t a one-off design. The product took shape across four iterative phases, each one refining the last and adding new screens as the workflow was pressure-tested. It grew from 19 baseline frames to a final set of 201, with 152 new or changed frames along the way.
That scale is the point: covering every state and every path across a product this size is exactly where a missing warning or an unhandled case quietly breaks the experience, and keeping it all coherent, phase after phase, was a core part of my role.
Highlighted decision — connecting device and app at a glance
In a busy salon, several YUV machines are often running at once. The early design had no clear way for a stylist to confirm which machine their app was actually connected to creating a risk of sending a formula to the wrong device.
I proposed confirming the connection through colour: giving each machine a distinct colour and mirroring that same colour in the app interface, so a stylist could verify the right pairing at a single glance and avoid mistakes in a high-pressure environment. The team adopted the idea and it fed into the final design.
This was a design decision that came from thinking through the system, not a tested
research finding, but it’s a good example of how I close the gaps others miss.
Outcome
The product I worked on went on to launch in the UK as the yuv® Lab, billed as the world’s first smart hair-colour lab for salons and freelancers, offered on a subscription model with the app, machine and iPad included.
It later broke records on Dragons’ Den, securing both the highest investment offered and the highest valuation in the show’s history, and the underlying technology is protected by two granted US patents. My contribution was to the digital experience and its delivery: turning early concepts into a complete, build-ready product, and making sure the whole team’s work reached the client as one clear story.
My recent work
Auricore
Leading discovery research for an ear-worn health wearable.
AI Art Platform
Building a scalable design system for an AI image-generation platform.
Hybrid Teams
Positioning a startup with audience research.