Trendpeek AI is a live social media intelligence tool built to help SMM specialists and content creators track competitors, analyse viral content, and generate content plans faster. I joined as a product and UX designer on a three-person founding team, taking ownership of the full research process and translating findings into product decisions and a dashboard redesign.

I structured the research around three core hypotheses: whether SMM specialists operate in permanent stress mode with too much work, whether competitor analysis is the biggest bottleneck in their workflow, and whether AI audit value lies in actionable output rather than insight alone. All three were confirmed through user interviews, with competitor analysis and trend research emerging as the clearest and most painful friction point in the workflow.

Key pains:

competitor analysis is slow and heavily manual

video transcription has no automated flow

asset sourcing is fragmented across platforms

most tools are desktop-only while users predominantly work from their phones.

The CJM mapped Anna's full journey across five stages: Awareness, Entrance Point, Consideration, Decision, and Retention: covering her actions, needs, pain points, touchpoints, and the opportunities the product could address at each moment.

Key opportunities that surfaced: simplify onboarding so users aren't dropped into an empty dashboard, surface keywords and tracked accounts earlier, reorganise the AI audit section for clearer hierarchy, and make the core experience fully functional on mobile.

The original dashboard had the right features but lacked visual hierarchy and clear entry points. In user interviews, one of the main issues was finding the right feature, that was also the core product. But as we found out, SMM specialists need to move fast and find relevant content immediately.

I creates The sidebar was restructured into distinct sections (General, Projects, Settings) so users always know where they are. Search became the dominant element at the top, research confirmed it's one of the most critical and frequently used features, yet it was buried in the original. Through the search and filters, multiple duplicated pages could be eliminited, improving the general website performance and reducing the cognitive load of choosing between two similar-sounding features.

The calmer visual language, lavender sidebar, cleaner typography, directly addresses the overload that research flagged as a core pain point for users managing multiple clients simultaneously.