01
User Research & Personas
We researched the real dancers in Marquise's community to understand who they were beyond "student" — their skill levels, their goals, and what kept them coming back every Monday.
A Home for a Dance Community
01
Overview
Every Monday, a group of adult dancers shows up to learn — contemporary one week, heels choreography the next, hip-hop after that — building something that's part class, part community, all led by Marquise. As that community grew, the parts holding it together started to strain: class bookings lived on Eventbrite, reminders went out over Instagram, and Marquise was left stitching two disconnected platforms together just to keep everyone in the loop. Marquise Mondays needed one home instead of two borrowed ones.
The Challenge
The challenge was building an app that captured the actual feeling of Marquise Mondays, not just its logistics — a place that felt like the community, not a scheduling tool bolted onto it. It also needed to make booking a class simple enough that students stopped defaulting to Eventbrite, while giving Marquise a direct line to the people he was teaching.
The Solution
The solution brought booking, community, and Marquise himself into one place: students can book a class in seconds, post their own dance videos for feedback, comment on each other's progress, and message one another directly. Marquise has a direct hand in all of it too — commenting and coaching on individual videos, and posting his own thoughts to the group whenever something's on his mind.
The app was designed to feel eccentric on purpose — pinks and greens, a personality that refuses to look like a generic booking tool — because Marquise Mondays was never meant to feel generic either. Underneath that personality, the real goal is a genuine community for dancers of every skill level and every style, not just a faster way to reserve a spot in class.
Marquise Mondays now has a fully designed, prototyped app that finally matches the community it was built for — validated directly with the dancers who'll use it, not designed in a vacuum. It's currently headed toward real development, with the goal of turning this from a prototype into the actual home the community has been missing.
