Hubli

Overview

Hubli is a mobile app for students that lets them save, organize, and share learning content. The first version was built by a team at Apple Developer Academy around folders, search, and content sharing. It worked as a utility. What it didn't do was bring people back. For V2, I took ownership of the redesign with one question at the center: what makes people return to a product voluntarily? The answer borrowed more from game design than from productivity tools. The real problem wasn't 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 didn't return to the app within a few sessions, they stopped entirely. There was no loop pulling them back, no visible progress, no emotional connection, no reason to open it tomorrow. This is the same retention problem that every consumer product faces, and the same one that game designers have spent decades solving. The question I needed to answer wasn't '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

I redesigned Hubli around three engagement mechanics. Reactions gave users an emotional layer, a way to customize how they feel about content, analyze patterns, and engage socially with others. Read Later and Archive addressed the behavioral reality that people save things they intend to return to, but only come back if the product makes that feel easy and rewarding. My Collection became the place where progress felt visible and personal. Together these features created a loop: save, engage, come back. The same loop that makes great games worth returning to.

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Links

• Apple Entrepreneur Camp Announcement →