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Lensora · 0–1 mobile product
Making professional
photography guidance
feel effortless
I transformed a complex, back-and-forth shooting process into a guided linear experience. Each step gives the user one clear task, while a separate system layer measures whether they are ready to move forward.
Role
Sole Product Designer
RESPONSIBILITIES
End-to-end UX/UI design
Stage
0-to-1
Timeline
Nov 2025 - Feb 2026
01
Product context
The opportunity
Taking a strong portrait requires many interconnected decisions: framing, camera position, subject position, pose, lighting, and timing. Experienced photographers make these judgments almost simultaneously. For a beginner, that creates cognitive overload before they ever press the shutter.
Lensora uses scene understanding and visual templates to guide people through those decisions in real time.
Design challenge
How might we translate an interconnected expert process into simple instructions without losing the precision the system needs?
02
The original experience
Where the flow broke down
A step-by-step flow that
still sent users backward.
The experience was divided into four steps so users could focus on one task at a time. But user testing revealed that the steps were not truly independent. Adjusting the camera angle in Positioning often disrupted the framing established in the previous step, forcing users into repeated corrections.
Core insight
Breaking the journey into steps reduced cognitive load, but it did not remove the dependencies between those steps.
03
Key design decisions
ONE CHANGE, TWO SIDES
01
REDEFINING POSITIONING
Instead of asking users to tilt the phone directly, I redesigned Positioning around two actions that preserve the previous framing: first adjust the phone’s height, then align it with the subject. The intended camera angle becomes the result of those actions, rather than a separate variable users must control.
BEFORE
Users were solving the system's problem.
Adjusting one step often changed the others, leading to repeated corrections and back-and-forth.
Early attempts
Backtracking
Preserves accuracy, but interrupts the flow.
Stacked guidance
Reduces backtracking, but overwhelms users with information.
Neither solved the underlying dependency between variables.
💡 Core insight
The problem wasn't the order of the steps.
It was what each step asked users to accomplish.
AFTER
Redefining the user's task.
Thank you for viewing my work :)
I'm Leona Lei. Let's connect!
Work in progress...
Still turning months of chaos into a coherent story.