DecorMatters
Design Operations internship. Owning the visual content pipeline behind weekly design challenges that drive user engagement and subscription growth.
Overview
DecorMatters is a home design app where users participate in weekly challenges: decorating virtual rooms within a curated set of visual constraints. The quality of each challenge directly shapes how deeply users engage with the platform, and sustained engagement is what moves users toward a premium subscription.
As a Design Operations Intern, I owned the end-to-end production of weekly challenges: sourcing images, selecting furniture, configuring each room, and maintaining visual consistency at scale. Roughly 30+ challenges per week, across a two-week cycle each month.
The Work
Each challenge required three things to work together: a compelling backdrop, furniture that felt intentional rather than assembled, and a configuration that gave users meaningful creative choices. None of that could be templated. Every room had to feel considered.
The weekly workflow moved through four stages:
Visual Research
Sourcing reference images and interior trends to define the visual direction for the week's challenge set. Keeping 30+ challenges fresh week after week required active research, not re-using what already worked.
Image Curation
Selecting backdrop, template, and contest images against three criteria: visual style consistency, content authenticity, and creative appeal. Every image needed to feel real and inviting, not generic.
Furniture Selection & Styling
Pairing furniture from the app's catalog to match each room's visual direction. Style, scale, and color had to read as a coherent set, not a collection of items that happened to fit.
Challenge Configuration
Defining placement requirements, item categories, and creative constraints in the admin CMS to shape how users would interact with and personalize each space.
High volume and creative freshness rarely coexist. Producing 36 challenges a week without repeating visual patterns or losing quality required a system, not just effort.
Process Improvement
The most time-consuming part of the workflow was furniture selection. Without a clear system, choosing pieces for each room meant browsing the full catalog repeatedly, which was slower to execute and inconsistent across challenges.
I proposed and implemented an improvement to the furniture selection process: organizing available pieces by style category and visual grouping, so the right furniture could be identified faster without sacrificing intentionality.
The result was a more repeatable process that reduced selection time while improving the coherence of each styled room. It also made it easier to maintain quality across the full weekly volume without relying on memory or trial and error each cycle.
AI-Assisted Content Creation
To keep up with the volume and freshness demands of 30+ weekly challenges, I integrated AI image generation into the content pipeline. Rather than relying solely on stock photography, I used AI to generate custom themed visuals that matched the specific aesthetic direction of each challenge set.
The key insight was strategic, not just visual: themed AI-generated content naturally surfaced the app's paid AI features within the challenge experience, guiding users toward them organically rather than through direct promotion. This approach drove a daily conversion rate 33% above the team average.
Dynamic Animated Filters
Beyond content production, I independently designed and built animated overlay filters for the app's post-design sharing flow — where users apply a filter before posting their room designs.
Each filter is designed in HTML/Canvas using procedural animation, then exported as APNG (iOS) and WebP (Android) for engineering handoff. I used Claude Code to implement seamless looping animation and manage the full export pipeline.
Impact
Challenges are the core engagement loop of the DecorMatters platform. Strong visual content keeps users returning, building the habit that eventually leads to a subscription upgrade. The challenges I produced were a direct part of that loop.
Premium membership unlocks AI-powered design suggestions and the ability to decorate rooms using personal photos. These features only become available after users pass an engagement milestone. The challenges I configured were part of the experience that moved users toward that threshold.