Your users are gen-Z. Do they actually listen to you?
We are Kira Sizova, Diana Lapik and Georgy Bychin — a team of three that covers research, design and code. We help companies build digital products and brands that young people actually use: from the first interview to a working website.
Gen Z skips anything that sounds like a lecture.
Young people don’t read bureaucratic guides. They ask friends, parents and ChatGPT. If a product sounds like a bank form, it loses them in seconds. Here’s how we solved this for one media product.
Checkpoint is a media about growing up for 16–25 year olds. Concept project, HSE Design School.
Problem: adult life comes without instructions.
Renting a flat, paying bills, taxes, a first job. School doesn’t teach this, and the internet is either too dry or too shallow. The idea came from our own experience: we kept facing simple adult tasks without knowing where to start.
Adult questions feel anxious, complex and unpleasant. Often it isn’t laziness: people simply don’t know what to do.
We started with people, not pictures.
First we studied the topic: what young people actually search for when they face adult tasks.
Our research base: pitch and brief, mission and values, audience analysis and the cultural context of growing up.
5 in-depth interviews revealed 3 core needs.
Young people want their difficulties to feel normal, not shameful. They want clear guidance from outside. And they feel lost in money questions most of all. They act only when a problem hits, so they look for the fastest path.
«Adult life feels like a slimy creature that gets inside you.» — interview respondent
Each finding became a design decision. People want to sort things out fast — so we added checklists, templates and difficulty indicators. Boring tasks get postponed — so we added a reading-time filter and clear topics. Context changes depth — so we mixed short posts with longreads.
Idea: not a teacher, but an older friend.
Checkpoint talks like a peer: casual, a bit ironic, never judging. Its archetypes are the Sage and the Caregiver. Every topic is packed as «situation → solution»: a short guide, a step-by-step plan or a checklist.
Identity: a save point, not a lecture.
Full logo and short mark: a crossroads with an arrow pointing forward.
Six sections — housing, money, documents, work, study, social life — each with its own color.
Feels like social media, not a textbook.
Social media posts: memes and real-life topics in one feed.
UX: every feature started as an insight.
Three job stories shaped the structure: read an article and dive deeper into a topic, get a checklist or template for my problem, learn more about the media itself.
Information architecture: from the home page to sections, formats and articles.
Wireframes for six key pages: home, section, article, checklist, template and about.
UI: complex topics in zoomer language.
UI kit: typography, buttons, tags, cards and navigation in one system.
