Luzit — A Social Event App for Israel's Gay Community

Mapped how the community shares and finds events today — dedicated Facebook and WhatsApp groups, Instagram, the ticketing site, individual host sites, Linktree. For each I asked the same set: what is the user trying to solve by using it, what are the pain points, what is the tool actually built for, and is it exclusive to this community? Alongside that I characterized the events themselves and the content that goes into them.

Segmented the audience — hosts and participants. Hosts break into sub-groups I carried through the market research and interviews to define who they are and what they need. Participants split by what they even knew existed — many knew only about parties, not the hikes, dinners, and support groups also happening. Run across ~25 host and ~30 participant interviews.

Studied the wider app category — dedicated discovery apps like Meetup, for how they solve the problem even though no one here uses them for this audience; plus visual research on gay-community apps (non-event) to learn the design language the audience already knows, so I could differentiate on purpose.

Hosts fight for visibility. They advertise the same event across many groups and platforms, repeatedly, with no single source of truth. The three host types feel it differently:

Across all three, some events are audience-subgroup-specific (gays, lesbians, trans, etc.).

Participants work to keep up. Discovery is spread across platforms that were never built for it, so events get missed — with no one place to look. Device: mobile.

Community-specific needs the incumbents ignore:

• Privacy — welcome both closeted and out users, and handle visibility with care. The open social platforms don't.
• Inclusion — every kind of event belongs, from a board-game night to a party rave.
• Exclusivity — make the product feel like a home for this community, where people feel safe.

Discovery is visual and social now — not calendar-shaped in people's heads. People scroll the creative, forward it, react to it.

The research pointed at a gap no competitor filled: none of them felt like a home for the gay community. So I built the identity to do exactly that — a warm, unmistakably queer visual language that looks nothing like the generic, cluttered platforms it competes with.

A mascot: an identity that does the emotional work

At the center is a mascot: a llama named Luzit ("schedule" in Hebrew) — the app's lead identity and its messenger. The idea comes straight from my gaming background: a character does emotional work a UI can't. It lowers the barrier to an unknown brand, and triggers a reaction — warmth, a smile — before the user has evaluated a single feature.

The character flexes by audience and message while keeping the brand instantly recognizable — a playful plot-driven hook for participants; a business message carrier for hosts — carrying one voice across the app and marketing. Under it sit the quieter research-driven calls: what to foreground versus keep in the background, microcopy in the community's own voice, a layout tuned to how this audience scrolls while adhering to its pain points.

The original calendar event list dated back to the product's launch, and it was doing a deliberate job: looking unlike the social tools where events got lost in a feed of a tool not meant for event discovery. Instead the app had an orderly, dated calendar that showed the app's organizational strength at a glance. But the app was looking stale, and with a new version being introduced, a fresh look was a reason for people to come back and see what changed. I used that as the opening to rethink discovery itself.

• Scrolling should feel like the platforms they already use. Discovery today is visual and social. I moved the calendar from full-width horizontal cards to a two-column vertical grid where the event posters take the main stage — colorful, varied, and interesting to the eye on the way down, closer to Instagram than to a list.
• The host's poster is their way to shine. It's the artwork they worked hardest on, and it's the same image they already posted on social — so the event is instantly recognizable to someone who's seen it before. Giving it a prominent stage makes the event pop, carries its atmosphere, and makes hosts happy to be on the platform.
• The grid created a new problem: the stranded card. With two columns, a day with an odd number of events leaves one card alone in a row. My solution was breather images — atmospheric illustrated tiles that fill the gap and do several jobs at once:
  • Strengthen the identity — the mascot appears in scenes drawn from gay life, so the product's community identity is reinforced between the events, not just around them.
  • Keep you scrolling — they're humorous, so you keep going to find the next one.
  • Invite sharing — the humor creates emotional engagement people want to pass on.
• The breathers became a distribution channel. Each one doubles as a WhatsApp sticker users can install on their own device — so the character travels outside the app, into the exact channel where this community already talks, building brand awareness on its own.

Guests can browse freely — but the app is built, end to end, to turn a guest into a member at the moment their curiosity peaks. A member gains access to social features.

• Finding the conversion points. I started by mapping where intent actually spikes — working from user behaviour and the goals people come to the app with — and picked the moments worth gating.
• Two views of every screen. For each one I designed a guest view and a member view, weighing community sensibilities and privacy in the split. On web, the guest view for internal app pages carries a second job: telling the guest what the app is inviting him to experience the main calendar feature page.
• Gates that invite instead of block. Every gated action is a humorous message in the mascot's voice, tied to the intent the user just showed, with a short path to sign-up.
• Tested, not assumed. I A/B-tested the gates, running one version of a gate's art and messaging against another and keeping the one that converted better.

• A character is a design tool, not decoration. For a wary audience meeting an unknown brand, the llama does emotional work no UI copy could — it earns a smile before the app earns trust.
• A craft fix can become a growth mechanic. The breather images started as a way to fill an odd gap in a two-column grid. Designed with intent, the same images became the app's cheapest distribution loop.
• Designing for a community means designing for belonging. Every call — the visual language, the social-feed discovery, the privacy-aware gates — traces back to one thing generic platforms can't offer: a space that feels like it's theirs.
• Test the conversion moment. Gates are easy to have opinions about and easy to A/B. I chose to measure.