Pool Party

In short

A final-year brief, a fictional client treated like a real one. Designing a peer-to-peer marketplace for renting private aquatic spaces (pools, jacuzzis, spas, hammams) between individuals. From strategic framing to the deliverable mockups, through art direction and communication strategy.

Solo project. Institut IEF2I, MBA in Digital Project Management. Six months.

Context

The use of private pools exploded after 2020. On the owners' side, maintaining a pool is expensive for a few weeks of actual use. On the demand side, families look for private aquatic spaces, by the day, without committing to a membership. The meeting point between the two remained poorly structured, scattered across a few platforms still largely unknown to the general public. That's where Pool Party started.

The brief called for a complete deliverable, from the requirements document to the website mockups, handled like a client project.

My role

Project lead across the whole scope. Framing, user research, information architecture, art direction, screen design, budget planning. I carried every phase end to end.

What I did

Strategic framing

Competitive review of P2P marketplaces, SEO and accessibility audit of competitors, three personas, MoSCoW matrix to prioritize features. This work laid the foundations for everything else.

Architecture and user journeys

Card sorting on Optimal Workshop to validate the sitemap with real users. Journey maps for both sides of the marketplace: the owner listing their pool, the visitor booking it. Information hierarchy designed mobile-first.

Art direction

A visual universe inspired by Art Nouveau and organic design, in response to the subject: water, soft shapes, curves. A distinctive palette, a type pairing of Cormorant Garamond for headings with Inter and Poppins for body text. Custom iconography.

The mockups

A complete design system in Figma, high-fidelity screens for the eight main pages of the site, responsive desktop and mobile variants.

Communication strategy

A twelve-month action plan covering SEO, SEA, SMO, emailing and CRM, with matching KPIs. Three budget scenarios to adapt the strategy to the client's actual budget.

What was hard

Staying the course over time. A six-month solo project is an endurance exercise as much as a design one. There are moments of doubt, moments when you want to rewrite everything, moments when you have to accept that a decision made a month ago no longer holds and iterate.

The other difficulty was juggling very different registers. Going from a budget to a color palette, from a steering matrix to a high-fidelity mockup, from an SEO study to a vector icon. These are different modes of thinking, and you have to learn to switch between them without losing the thread.

What I take away

Learning to carry a project alone from A to Z, knowing when to rely on my own resources and when to look for help outside. Knowing how to move from strategic thinking to a design decision without losing the coherence of the whole. And accepting that a long project demands as much flexibility as method.

Rigor is what keeps a project standing. Flexibility is what makes it good.