Aya Demler

Daydream is a fashion platform that enables people to chat with an agent to find and shop for products online. I led the iOS app as the sole designer to figure out what shopping with an agent should feel like on a phone. We went from kickoff to launch in four months, July to November 2025. Apple later featured it at WWDC’s keynote address. To understand more about Daydream, visit the site.

Clubs was Duolingo’s first social feature, and I was its sole and founding designer. Until then, Duolingo was a single-player app: your streak, your XP, your lessons. Clubs put learners of the same language into small groups with a shared feed, social language challenges, and Duolingo’s first leaderboard. It didn’t last, but a lot of what it taught us showed up in what came next.

Duolingo launched Plus, its first paid subscription, in 2017. The challenge was growing subscribers ahead of the IPO without breaking the promise that learning on Duolingo stays free. I was one of the early designers on monetization, and every project here is one I owned: the hooks that sold premium features, the moments where we offered Plus, New Year’s promotions, and the gem economy for free learners.

I joined Squarespace at the start of 2020 to be a part of the Mobile App team. At the time (pre-COVID), Squarespace was seeing a rise in customers using Squarespace on their devices, which was a new development for a predominantly desktop-led product. I was brought on to help redesign their mobile app experiences to meet this change in demand.

In early 2020, Squarespace was seeing a rise in mobile-only sign-ups, which was new for a desktop-led company. Metrics consistently showed that customers who completed a shortlist of core actions were significantly more likely to retain. Essentially, making a site look and feel like your own got people to stick around and commit. The following is work on how I developed a native-first approach to getting people to love their site before they even get started.

I was at Meta from 2020 to 2021, the sole designer for Messenger’s web surfaces. This isn’t one case study. It’s what Meta taught me: a few things I still do every day, and a few I happily left behind.

What if fans could own a piece of the music they love? Royal let artists like Nas, Diplo, and The Chainsmokers sell portions of their music rights directly to fans through Limited Digital Assets (LDAs). Fans could earn streaming royalties, while artists gained a new way to raise capital and connect with their audiences. I led the design of Royal’s collector experiences, shaping its music royalty platform.