HeyOrca got a glow up! All aboard HeyOrca’s newly designed app

You might have logged into HeyOrca recently and noticed some whale-sized changes.

Well, the secret’s out! We’ve been working behind the scenes on modernizing our app’s design since late 2023 and we’re excited for our community to see the first big change. 

A quick history of HeyOrca’s design

We first launched HeyOrca’s app in 2017 and since then, its design hasn’t undergone any large changes. 

Being a small product team with limited resources, we focused on building features our community needed to be successful social media managers and community builders and getting them out as quickly as possible. This meant sometimes cutting a few design corners, especially as our list of features and integrations expanded.

Now that we feel good about our feature list, it was time to focus on modernizing our app’s design, improving its consistency, and giving our users a more delightful experience.

In November 2023, HeyOrca's Product Team joined forces with a design agency EBDA and after three months of improvements, iterations, feedback sessions, and more, the designs were ready to send to development.

What changes the HeyOrca community can expect next

The new look of our app is professional with a fun modern twist. We kept the overall design clean and simple and we added a splash of our branded pink and gradients as highlights.

First on our list was to update the Navigation Panel since that impacts the experience of the entire app. As you saw in the earlier picture, the updated Navigation Panel is where we introduced our gradient style and rounded tiles that are more pleasing to the eye.

The Organization Settings page also received new tiles and details that make the design more cohesive and modern while maintaining the same experience.

And there are more updates from there. Over the next several months, our community will continue to see updates to pages across the app, such as:

• Calendar view (This page is probably my favourite! We gave it extra attention knowing that our community spends the most time on these pages.)
• Reports
• Social Inbox
• Notes
• Library
• And more!

Involving the community

Our Stans (ie, our most engaged community members and top 1% of HeyOrca users) have played major roles in the reskin project. We’ve had many design previews and discussions with our Stans community around design iterations of the app and which designs they preferred. Our Stans helped us make some big design decisions, and we are so appreciative of their opinions to help guide us.

Here are a few words they used to describe the final result: clean, refreshed, unicorn (love!), and minimalist.

What’s next for HeyOrca’s app?

The goal of our reskin was to refresh the UI of our app. There are other parts of the app where we’ll next focus on the user experience.

The area of the app that is top of mind for me is the homepage where our community views their dashboard. There's room to make the page more valuable.

Try it yourself and send us feedback

Interested in seeing the reskin in action? Log in to your HeyOrca account or start a free trial. We’d love to hear what you and your clients think of the new changes. Feel free to reach out to our customer care team with any questions or feedback around our reskin.