Walkie-Talkie is a place where GenZ can talk and meet with anyone without having to worry about how they look. I led the redesign that transformed a prank-call toy with 1% retention into a voice-first social network that reached 21 million users and a 63.8% 30-day retention.
Founding · Product · UI/UX · Motion design
Consumer mobile · Social · Voice
Primarily female GenZ (18 – 24)
1% → 63.8% 30-day retention · 21M users
The app was originally built as a walkie-talkie tool for friend groups · especially for pranking. Downloads were very high, but user engagement dropped to 1% after 30 days. The product needed a reason to come back.
The redesign brief: turn a one-trick novelty into a reason to return.
I built persona profiles to identify the context of use and motivations beyond prank calls. Visual mood boards gave us direction for branding · a retro-vibe community of people looking to express themselves and meet.
A competitive analysis against top-tier apps in the same sector · Zello, Voxer, WT Now, Two Way · identified gaps in user connection and personalization. Nobody was treating voice as a place to belong.
Our audience was primarily female GenZ (18 – 24). Most were looking for spontaneous connections · a surprise finding. Users wanted to meet new people, not just reach known friends.
I built low-fidelity wireframes and user flows, then tested them with groups of 10 users each · gathering feedback on which features would actually drive engagement.
We ran brainstorming sessions to evaluate user feedback and shape the feature set. Discoverability, monetization, moderation, topics and onboarding became our five pillars.
We offered a simple sign-up / verification and a quick, playful personalization step so users could express themselves before ever talking. 78% of downloads converted to accounts.
We moved from a walkie-talkie tool to a social-network experience. It became easy to connect with anyone you care about · and to quickly understand the vibe of a frequency before tuning in.
Creating a fun and safe app was a top priority. We added easy-to-use monitoring filters, clear community guidelines, and technology to identify abusive behaviour patterns. "Be kind" wasn't a tagline · it was an onboarding step.
The walkie-talkie mascot became a playful avatar · so users could focus on how they talk, not how they look. We experimented with paid accessories (hats, sunglasses, hair) with strong success.
The main goal of the first redesign was to lift 30-day retention from 1%. After launch, the numbers settled at an average of 63.8% on a 30-day cycle for users with 1+ friends · and 90%+ for users with 10+ friends.
Walkie-Talkie reached the App Store top charts in the US, France, Brazil, Turkey and many other countries · and grew to 21 million users.
Walkie-Talkie taught me that retention isn't something you bolt on with notifications · it's the shape of the product itself. Moving from a tool to a social network required changing what the app was, not just how it looked. The mascot, the avatars, the "Be Kind" agreement, and the frequency-as-room metaphor were all one decision: give people a reason to come back tomorrow.