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Helping users reach the value of mental wellness sooner

Improving activation and retention for Quabble's daily mental wellness experience

Quabble · Mental Wellness Mobile App

Case study hero image
Role
Product / UX Designer
Scope
UX audit · User research · Product discovery · Journey analysis · Onboarding · Paywall UX · Interaction design · Growth experiments · UX QA
Collaborators
Head of Product · CEO · Engineering · Marketing
Timeline
Initial UX audit: 2 weeks · Ongoing collaboration: ~1 year

Quabble helps people build mental wellness into everyday life through short, playful mental workouts.

The product already had a distinctive visual identity and a growing library of content. The bigger challenge was helping users understand why they should come back — and experience that value early enough to form a routine.

I initially joined the project through a UX audit. That work developed into a broader collaboration across activation, onboarding, paywall experience, engagement and retention.

The question became:

How might we help users experience a meaningful mental workout sooner — and make coming back feel worth it?

The real problem wasn't visual design

Quabble already looked good.

The issue was that visual quality alone didn't guarantee that users understood:

  • what a "mental workout" was,
  • where to start,
  • how Quabble fitted into their daily life,
  • or why they should return tomorrow.

At the time, activation was a major product focus.

The team was looking closely at:

Time to first workout completed

because completing a workout represented the first point where a new user could experience the product's core value.

That changed how I approached the work.

Instead of asking:

"Where are the usability issues?"

I started asking:

"What is preventing someone from reaching the meaningful part of the product?"

From UX friction to product behaviour

I started with a screen-by-screen heuristic audit, reviewing usability, hierarchy, navigation, interaction patterns and clarity.

But rather than treating every usability issue equally, I grouped findings according to the behaviour they might affect.

Discover

Can a new user understand what Quabble offers?

Start

Can they confidently choose and begin a mental workout?

Experience value

Do they understand what they're getting from completing it?

Return

Does the product give them a reason to make mental wellness part of their routine?

This helped turn a long list of interface issues into product priorities.

Decision 01

Prioritise the path to the first meaningful workout

One of the most important things I learned from the project was that registration isn't necessarily activation.

A user can download the app.

Create an account.

Browse several screens.

And still never understand why the product matters.

For Quabble, the more meaningful moment happened when someone actually completed a mental workout.

So I started evaluating the experience around a simple question:

How much work does a new user have to do before experiencing Quabble?

Anything standing between entry and that first meaningful experience needed to justify its existence.

This influenced how I assessed:

  • onboarding,
  • content discovery,
  • calls to action,
  • navigation,
  • explanations,
  • and the sequence in which product information appeared.

The goal wasn't simply to make onboarding shorter.

It was to make the path to value clearer.

Decision 02

Explain the value before asking users to commit

Mental wellness is a difficult category because the benefit isn't always immediately tangible.

"Do a mental workout every day" is a behaviour.

But it doesn't yet explain why I should care today.

So I explored how onboarding and the paywall could communicate Quabble's value earlier.

Instead of focusing primarily on features, the experience needed to answer:

What will this help me with?

What does using Quabble actually feel like?

Why would I come back tomorrow?

This meant surfacing the experience itself earlier and making the relationship between small daily actions and longer-term wellbeing easier to understand.

I also explored the paywall as part of the user journey rather than an isolated conversion screen.

A paywall should not be the first place where the product clearly explains why it is valuable.

Decision 03

Make wellness feel like a journey, not a content library

Another opportunity was helping users understand where individual workouts fitted into their broader wellness experience.

A collection of exercises gives users choice.

But choice alone doesn't create progress.

So I explored ways to make the experience feel more like a mental wellness journey — helping users understand:

  • what they could do today,
  • how activities related to their goals,
  • what they had already completed,
  • and what they might do next.

This shifted the experience away from:

"Here are some wellness activities."

towards:

"Here is something useful you can do for yourself today."

That distinction was important because habit-building depends on reducing the effort required to decide what to do next.

Decision 04

Bring the product into the user's daily routine

Opening an app requires someone to remember that the app exists.

That sounds obvious, but it becomes important when you're designing for habit formation.

I explored a mobile widget that placed Quabble's daily experience directly on the phone's home screen.

Rather than asking users to remember:

"I should open my wellness app today."

the product could become an ambient reminder:

"Here's something small you can do for yourself right now."

The widget therefore wasn't primarily a UI feature.

It was a hypothesis about retention and routine formation.

Designing the experiment

A potentially misleading way to evaluate the widget would have been:

Compare people who install the widget with people who don't.

But there was an obvious problem.

Users were prompted inside Quabble to install the widget.

That meant the people who chose to install it were likely already:

  • more engaged,
  • more curious about the product,
  • or more motivated to build a routine.

If widget users subsequently completed more workouts, we couldn't confidently say the widget caused that behaviour.

Selection bias

The more engaged users may simply have been more likely to install it in the first place.

So I approached the feature as an experiment instead.

For the initial test, traffic could be split among paid users, the segment the team was focused on delivering value for.

Control

Existing experience.

Variant

Widget experience / widget promotion.

I would compare behaviours such as:

Workout completion frequency

Return rate

Time between workouts

Daily routine participation

rather than simply measuring widget installs.

Because:

Installing a feature isn't value. Using the product more meaningfully might be.

Understanding motivation beyond the interface

As my involvement with Quabble expanded, I also worked on growth and user research beyond individual screens.

I helped explore questions such as:

Who receives the most value from Quabble?

Why do some people continue while others disengage?

Which needs should the product prioritise?

I worked on survey design to better understand different user groups and their motivations, and explored user stories as a way to make the community and benefits of mental wellness feel more relatable.

This helped connect interface decisions with a broader product question:

What makes Quabble worth returning to?

What changed

The initial audit was reviewed with Quabble's Head of Product and shared with the wider team for prioritisation.

80%

of my initial recommendations were taken onboard for consideration.

~30%

were implemented during subsequent product updates.

More importantly, the project expanded beyond a one-off UX review.

I went on to contribute to areas including:

Onboarding · Paywall experience · Mental wellness journey · Engagement concepts · Retention widget · Growth research · UX QA

The work changed how I thought about product design:

Fixing friction is useful.

Understanding the behaviour behind the friction is more powerful.

Measuring success

I wouldn't evaluate this work using one engagement number alone.

I'd look at the user journey as a funnel:

App opened

→ Onboarding completed → Workout discovered → First workout started → First workout completed → Second workout completed → Routine established

And then ask where users are losing momentum.

The metrics I'd pay particular attention to are:

Time to first workout completed

How quickly does a new user experience the core product?

First → second workout conversion

Did the first experience create enough value to bring them back?

Workout completion frequency

Are users integrating Quabble into their routine?

Retention by behaviour

Do users who complete workouts, use certain content or interact with routine features retain differently?

These tell us much more than simply asking how many people opened the app.

What I learned

Activation is the moment a user experiences value — not the moment the company acquires a user.

This project changed the way I think about onboarding.

A successful sign-up does not automatically mean someone understands a product.

A completed onboarding flow doesn't either.

For Quabble, I became much more interested in the moment when someone could genuinely think:

"Ah — this is what this product can do for me."

That became a useful lens for evaluating everything from navigation to onboarding and retention.

Product experiments need to separate correlation from causation

The widget work also reinforced an important lesson about product data.

If highly engaged users voluntarily adopt a feature, their higher engagement afterwards does not necessarily mean the feature caused it.

Recognising that bias changed the question from:

"Do widget users engage more?"

to:

"Does introducing the widget cause users to engage differently?"

That is a small wording change, but a very different product question.

If I continued this work

I would focus next on understanding what makes the first mental workout meaningful enough to create a second one.

I would segment retention by:

  • first workout type,
  • user motivation,
  • onboarding path,
  • frequency of early workouts,
  • subscription status,
  • and use of routine features.

From there, I would test personalised next-workout recommendations and different ways of reinforcing progress.

Not to maximise screen time.

But to help users build a wellness routine that remains useful without needing the app to demand their attention.

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