Trendnow
Trendnow turns live search trends into conversation.
Keywords refresh every five minutes, and each one opens a board that lives for thirty unless people keep talking. Every post and comment buys the board more time.
Role
Team Side Project
Duration
2025
Team
Web Platform / Chrome Extension
Focus
Product Strategy, UX/UI Design, Prototyping
Challenge
A trend everyone sees, and no one talks about
Trend rankings show what is gaining attention, never why it matters. By the time someone
catches up across a search portal, a news site, and whatever forum happens to be discussing it,
the moment has passed.
Communities built on trends face the opposite problem, threads pile up long after anyone cares.
Research
The gap was not information. It was the distance between seeing, understanding, and joining in
I reviewed search portals, news products, and online communities,
and looked at engagement signals such as post views, comments, and time spent.
Rankings offered immediacy but no explanation.
News offered information but nothing to do with it. Communities hosted discussion but weren't built around topics that expire.
The Spike
Attention arrives in minutes and leaves just as fast. A keyword that tops the ranking in the morning can be irrelevant by evening.
The Thread
Discussion needs time to build. Forums keep threads open long after anyone cares, so activity and relevance drift apart.
How might we?
How might we help people go from spotting a topic to joining
its discussion before the moment passes
and give them a reason to keep it alive?
My Role
I designed the product across the website and Chrome extension
As the product designer on this team side project, I defined the concept
and the full path from spotting a keyword to posting on its board.
That covered product research, information architecture, user flows, interaction
and UI design, prototyping, usability validation, the design system, and developer handoff.
Key Contributions
01
Market and competitor research
02
Product strategy and information architecture
03
Time limited board system
and extension rule
Key Solutions
Three moments between noticing a topic and talking about it
Trendnow shortens one path. Discover a topic, understand it, and join its board before the timer runs out.
Each solution owns one step.
Trending lists tell you what is hot, never how long it lasts.
Every keyword carries its own countdown, so readers can see
what is peaking and what is about to disappear.
Keyword Detail
Community Boards
Trending threads expire by design. Some conversations shouldn't.
Free, politics, and entertainment boards stay open, so the community has somewhere to live between spikes.
Chrome Extension
Checking what's trending meant leaving whatever you were doing.
The extension puts the Top 10, AI summaries, and boards one click from any tab.
Outcome
The MVP showed stronger activation and longer sessions
01
+40% increase in new user activation
02
5 → 8 min average session time
03
5 min refresh cycle keeping the Top 10 live
04
1 click board access from the Chrome extension
Reflection
Designing a mechanic means designing what it rewards
The extension rule worked: sessions got longer and people came back.
But a system that rewards activity rewards all activity. Low-effort comments extend a board
as effectively as good ones, and a heated topic can hold itself open indefinitely.
That reframed the problem for me. The next version needs the mechanic to weigh quality, not just volume
and needs source attribution on AI summaries, since trust in the summary is what everything else stands on.
I now think about what a rule incentivizes as early as I think about whether people will use it.
Next project
Everyone Waiter
