Rye
Overview
Rye brought Awka in to align the product UI as the team moved from MVP scaffolding to a coherent surface. The brief was specific: bring visual & interaction consistency across the existing flows without slowing engineering down. The answer was to skip the Figma-to-spec-doc round trip entirely. UI direction was authored directly in the Rye codebase. Shadcn/ui as the component base, Tailwind tokens as the styling layer, every decision committed as code the team could ship the same day. Three workstreams ran in parallel: a UX audit of the live onboarding, the tokenized system built into the repo, and a marketing site shipped inside 24 hours.
UX Audit
Design System
Product Design
Role
Consulting Product Designer, working inside the codebase. Authored UI changes directly in React, shadcn/ui & Tailwind. Paired with Engineering on architecture, with Product on flow.
Impact
Product surfaces converged onto a single visual & interaction language without a separate design-system project, a spec-doc loop, or a handoff queue. Self-serve onboarding became navigable in minutes, no sales handhold needed. The shadcn + Tailwind foundation gave Engineering room to ship new surfaces in the same register Awka set, after the engagement closed. Marketing site went live before the launch window opened.
Tasks
[+] UI direction across product surfaces, authored in code
[+] Shadcn/ui component base, configured for the Rye brand
[+] Tailwind tokens for colour, spacing, type, radii, motion
[+] UX audit of the live product & flow simplification
[+] Self-serve onboarding redesigned end-to-end
[+] Core flow screens with full state coverage
[+] Figma Make prototype for rapid flow validation
[+] Tokenized design system, committed straight to the repo
[+] Marketing site, designed & shipped in 24 hours
