Hubli
Redesigning a learning app around one question: why would someone come back?
Overview
Students save learning content with good intentions and rarely return to it. Journey mapping and usage data pointed to the same pattern across users: after the first few sessions, people stopped coming back entirely. The first version of Hubli worked as a utility. It did not work as a habit.
For V2, I took ownership of the redesign with one question at the center: what makes people return to a product voluntarily? The answer .
Game designers have spent decades solving the problem of voluntary return. The mechanics, visible progress, earned rewards, social comparison, are not tricks. They are the answer to a real behavioral truth: people come back when coming back feels meaningful. Productivity tools are organized around content. Games are organized around motivation. Hubli needed to be the latter.
The real problem was not how content was organized. It was that nothing in the experience rewarded engagement or made progress feel worth coming back for.
Challenge
The V1 journey map revealed a critical pattern: when users did not return to the app within a few sessions, they stopped entirely. There was no loop pulling them back, no visible progress, no emotional connection, .
Habits form when behavior becomes automatic enough that a trigger, seeing the app, arriving at a natural moment in the day, leads to a routine action. The gap in V1 was that nothing connected the trigger to a reward. There was nothing to check, nothing that had changed, no sense that the product had anything new to offer since last time.
The question I needed to answer was not how do we improve the organization. It was how do we design a habit.
Process
Discovering why people stopped coming back
I mapped the user journey across different scenarios and found the critical drop-off point: when users didn't engage multiple times early on, they didn't return at all. I supplemented this with non-participant observation, doing digital ethnography across social platforms to understand how students naturally engaged with content outside of structured tools. The pattern was clear. People returned to products that felt alive, not organized.
Defining the real problem
Using Job Stories instead of user stories, I reframed the problem around motivation rather than functionality. The problem statement shifted from 'users can't find their content' to 'users don't feel rewarded for engaging.' I used reverse brainstorming to stress-test every assumption, deliberately asking how to make the experience worse before designing for better.
Designing the engagement loop
I generated multiple alternatives before converging on a visual user flow built around three core mechanics: emotional engagement through Reactions, behavioral design through Read Later and Archive, and progress visibility through My Collection. A style guide and component library were built to keep the experience coherent across the product.
Testing and validating
I ran usability testing via Maze with 5 users and a heuristic evaluation to identify friction and validate the core engagement hypothesis. Results showed clear improvements in time spent and engagement metrics compared to V1.
Solution
The redesign gave users a reason to open the app tomorrow. Reactions made engaging with saved content feel emotionally meaningful rather than purely organizational. Read Later and Archive turned passive saving into active intention. My Collection made progress visible and personal, the kind of thing you check on rather than forget about.
My Collection became the place where progress felt visible and personal. Together these features created a loop: save, engage, come back. .
The loop works because each step reinforces the next. Saving something creates an intention. Reactions make engaging with that content feel emotionally meaningful. My Collection makes returning feel like checking on something that belongs to you. No single feature creates a habit. The loop does.
Presentation
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Impact
The redesign was selected for Apple's inaugural Entrepreneur Camp for Black Founders and Developers in 2021. More than a retention fix, it became a proof of concept: the most durable engagement mechanic is not better organization. It is giving someone something to come back for.
In the media
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