Senior Charlesa Thompson, a user experience and interaction design major, struggled to gain traction from her peers after pitching the creation of a textured hair care app in one of her classes.
It wasn’t until enrolling in the “Digital Design III: Experience” course taught by Becky Luther, a professor in the School of Design, that Thompson found the team and the support to bring Braid to life.
In Fall 2024, Thompson and three senior interaction design majors, Taiwo Ayedun, Gabrielle Vidal and Areanna Whittington, were part of a class in Columbia’s UX/UI design program. With guidance from Jo-Nell Sieren, assistant professor of instruction in the School of Design and the group’s faculty advisor, they set out to develop an educational resource focused on textured hair.
The app serves as a digital learning hub that offers personalized features to support users with textured hair. It includes a tailored home page, AI-powered chatbot for guidance, curated product recommendations, educational courses on styling and cultural history and a customizable profile for users to track their hair care journey.
Thompson wanted to create the app because while she grew up with an older mom, she said she wasn’t able to look up the different hairstyles and replicate them on Thompson’s hair. If there had been an app like Braid on the market, Thompson believes that it would have been an aide to her mom.
“We’re able to work together well because there’s no other app like Braid, especially not one we’ve been so passionate about,” Vidal said. “It feels like the circumstances of our meeting were for a reason. Each of us were called to work on Braid to further develop an app that will benefit those with textured hair who the industry has overlooked.”
The team currently has developed a fully functioning front-end prototype and is working on building the app’s back-end in collaboration with a group of four programmers.
“As a designer, you think about grids, you think about typography, you think about color theory, but you have to be able to translate, especially me as lead UX/UI, I have to be able to have strong conversations with programmers in a language that they understand while also hitting the points that we need,” Thompson said.
The team plans to submit their prototype to competitions and use the prize money to help fund the app’s development, with the goal of officially launching the app later this year.
Sieren, who teaches in the UX/UI design program, helped the group with further development and creating investor pitches. She said that there haven’t been many challenges along the way as the group has been focused on the endgame from the beginning.
“I think that they are doing everything right,” Sieren said. “They’re showing up for each other, taking great care of each other, and I just love watching all this happen. From my perspective, it is just such a beautiful thing.”
According to Thompson, who is the lead UX/UI designer and product strategist for the project, said the team is like a “sisterhood.” At the end of the day, the team recognizes that they are working towards something that is bigger than themselves.
“I think we work perfectly together,” Thompson said. “As we all know, teams, we all have our moments, but that’s just with every friendship and every collaboration, but we always realize how important this work is and how careful we should keep our perspectives on this work.”
Whittington, the group’s project manager, said the app highlights an area in society that tends to be overlooked. In her opinion, Braid will close a gap in the beauty industry so that minority groups feel heard and supported.
Recent legal changes in three states have reflected the importance of textured hair curriculum. In late 2023, New York passed a law requiring all in-state cosmetology schools to include texture hair education in their general curriculum. Minnesota and Connecticut followed shortly after in 2024, passing the same law.
“We want to be a trusted source for learning about natural and textured hair history, its significance,” Whittington said. “At the same time, we aim to help people find new styles, track hair journeys and build a community. Braid just gives everyone a place to celebrate hair, celebrate the beauty of texture and remove the stigma caused by traditional beauty standards.”
Copy edited by Matt Brady
