Bubbles

The situation

Between deadlines and Lagos traffic, laundry was the last thing on my mind. That was one of the first things a user said in a research call, and it kept coming back. Working professionals in Lagos were carrying too much. The commute, the workload, the weight of a city that asks a lot from you every single day. Laundry piled up, not because people didn’t care, but because they were exhausted.

On the other side of the city, local laundry vendors were struggling too. Skilled, hardworking, and mostly invisible. The people who needed them couldn’t find them. And the ones who did find them didn’t always trust the process.

Bubbles was built to close that gap. A full-service laundry app that connected busy professionals to trusted local vendors, without the awkward middle where nobody knows what’s happening with your clothes.

What I did

I designed the whole product. Brand identity, user research (interviews with both users and vendors, journey mapping, pain point synthesis), information architecture, the mobile app, the landing page, and the admin dashboard vendors use to manage their side of the business.

How I approached it

Two sides, one product.

Most marketplaces optimise for one side and let the other struggle. Bubbles couldn’t afford that. Busy professionals needed convenience and trust. Vendors needed a scalable way to reach customers who didn’t know them yet. Every design decision had to serve both. When they pulled against each other, I found the version that respected both.

Trust was a design problem, not a marketing problem.

The hesitation wasn’t “is this app useful?” It was “will my clothes come back the way I sent them?” So I built trust into the interface itself. Vendor ratings visible before booking. Order status updates that read like a real human is on the other side. Payment confirmation that doesn’t leave you wondering. Every screen answering the quiet question: “am I safe here?”

A brand that felt like Lagos.

The brand had to feel warm, human, and unmistakably Nigerian. Not premium in the aspirational-out-of-reach way, and not cheap in the corner-cutting way. Just honest, familiar, and slightly playful. Bubbles as a name earns its own energy. The visual identity was built to match: soft, confident, easy on the eye after a long day.

The vendor side had to feel like a real business tool.

For the professionals we were designing for, the app was a convenience. For the vendors, it was livelihood. The admin dashboard needed to give them real control: order queues, payment tracking, service scheduling, customer communication. I designed it with the assumption that a vendor might be using it on a cracked phone screen at 9pm while closing up shop. It had to work in that context, not just in a Figma mockup.

What happened

Bubbles launched, both the app and the website. One user said, “I’d pay extra just to not think about laundry again.” That line stayed with me. It was the whole promise of the product, said back to us by someone who felt it.

Looking back

Bubbles taught me what it means to design for two sides at once, and how much of that comes down to respecting both. The busy professional and the local laundry vendor are living very different days. But both of them deserve a tool that makes their life easier, not one that makes them feel small.

The other thing that stayed with me is how much a product’s environment shapes the work. Traffic, exhaustion, hustle, warmth, all of it went into the product without needing to be named. That’s the version of context-aware design I want to keep doing.