Lore - A Brand New Rabbit-holing Experience
Summer 2025 - alongside product designers Karissa Wong and Bruce Cao
OVERVIEW
A design studio, a non-existing product, 6 weeks, and 3 designers
During this summer, I worked alongside a design studio called Otherkind, acting as a temporary founding designer for a startup called Lore. The founders of Lore had a vision to make the rabbit-holing experience accessible on your computer, and our job was to bring this vision to life. We had to visualize their ideas to attract investment opportunities. Together, my team and I created 8 high fidelity prototypes of the key features we thought would gather interest.
I was lead for product thinking and half of the prototyping. Our prototypes helped Lore raise around $10.1 million dollars during their seed round!
CONTEXT
Every fan rabbit-holes…
Lore began with the founders' love for rabbit-holing. Inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, this metaphor describes becoming engrossed in a time-consuming search experience, where you willingly follow a chain of information or thoughts that leads you further and further from your question. Lore is a startup that wants to allow fans to dive into these bottomless rabbit-holes and find information easily.
DESIGNING 0-1
Bringing a founder's vision to life.
Part of our design process was making sense of the founders' scattered vision, and designing custom assets from scratch. The founders wanted something gamified yet scalable, so we had to find a balance between functionality and aesthetic, and found ways to bring the lore magic to life.
FINAL DESIGNS
What better way to talk through the solution that with the drake and kendrick beef?
Discovery often happens via social media
Rabbit-holing often begins when a user sees something on social media. I wanted to design a way for users to save these miscellaneous pieces of information to then use on Lore. So I designed a Lore browser companion in the form of a floating action button that acts as a storage device and holds your external media.
Captivating users when they first land on the Lore website
These prototypes needed to make an impact on investors, so we focused on making the moment of arrival on lore feel magical and dynamic, with the context you find externally automatically loaded up on the website.
People care about others' opinions
People are social creatures and they care a lot about what other people think. This feature allows them to vote on via a battle bar on different theories and online discussions, contributing towards the rabbit-holing experience.
Generating information through dragging
Navigating through tabs is annoying. Users should be able to generate more information on the same topic through simple gestures, like dragging! Drag the information card to dynamically generate new relevant information. This makes the information consumption experience a never ending one where you don’t have to stop reading!
Personalizing the information consumption experience
Users should be able to view the information in whatever form makes most sense to them — In this case, videos. Use the card transform spell to personalize the way you are consuming content through text, video, images, or a mix of everything.
LOOKING BACK
Learning when to detach from my work
Detachment isn’t about not caring. It’s about caring from an objective standpoint, for the greater good of your work and your growth. I learned that being attached to my work meant that every output I produce — regardless of the circumstance and my level of competence — becomes a part of my identity - which can be detrimental to my wellbeing.
Trade-offs help us make better decisions
During the first 4 weeks of the project, we wanted to design the full end-to-end experience, which included gamification, navigation, and the post rabbit-holing reward. We soon came to realize we had to give up some of our project scope to ensure we could design what they founders wanted. I learned to prioritize product needs over my desires as a designer.