Building a playful Korean language-learning app with Nissi
Nissi Inc. ❋ Product Designer ❋ Apr - June (2025)
Overview
NISSI is a lifestyle learning app designed for foreigners to fully immerse themselves in Korean culture through daily missions and personalized growth plans.
I designed the UI/UX of the app, which shipped in June 2025 and reached 100+ users.
Toolkit: Figma, User Research, Product Strategy
🧩 Challenge
Foreigners in Korea struggle with feeling connected.
How might we make adapting to life in Korea more practical and motivating for foreign students?
The founders of Nissi realized that many international students in Korea struggled not just with the language, but with adapting to other cultural differences in their daily lives. Existing apps focused only on grammar or vocabulary, so our team wanted to create something more immersive like a Korean mentor or friend who guides users through language, culture, and self-growth.
🚀 Process
Competitor research
Every feature in Nissi is designed to make the experience not just educational, but also personal and motivating. Through competitor research, we ideated features to help Nissi differentiate from other language-learning apps.
Daily plans
AI coaching
Vision board
The final theme, "Where ideas take flight".
Leveraging components for seamless collaboration across the team
The project had a tight timeline, aiming for a launch by the end of June 2025. As the sole designer on the team, designing the UI for the entire app within the given timeframe was challenging. To address this, I created reusable components that enabled the founders to implement their own screens while maintaining consistency, effectively distributing the workload.
Designing components was crucial in building a consistent brand identity across the app. The founders envisioned Nissi to be bright and playful so that it would eye-catching for new users. I drew inspirations from pop art, using bold colours but softening the saturation to be easier on the eyes in consideration of longer usages of the app.
Custom icons
The final theme, "Where ideas take flight".
I wanted to achieve a unique and cohesive brand identity, so I created custom icons tailored to reflect our brand's playful and bright aesthetics. I drew inspiration from competitors, while adapting designs to remain consistent with Nissi's usage of thin strokes, blocky shapes, and wide range of colours.
The final theme, "Where ideas take flight".
🏆 Result
We're on the app store: Nissi
The final theme, "Where ideas take flight".
View my UI/UX designs in the app!
The final theme, "Where ideas take flight".
💭 Reflection
Balancing stakeholder perspectives
The final theme, "Where ideas take flight".
As the sole designer, I was responsible for communicating design decisions to the rest of the team. Through discussions, I learned that my vision did not always align with other perspectives. I had to recognize practical constraints such as tight deadlines and limited resources, which made it challenging to implement certain features or maintain perfect UI consistency as other members were onboarded to the design work to ensure the app shipped on time.
Although the UI designs were not delivered perfectly, I learned to compromise my vision to best reflect business needs and goals!