Helping users reach their aha moment
Quabble · Mental Wellness App
- Role
- UX Designer / Product Marketer
- Period
- Dec 2024–Jan 2026
- My Contributions
- UX QA · Onboarding & paywall UX design · User research · Growth partnerships · Community content strategy
- Platforms
- Mobile app
- Collaborators
- Head of Product, CEO, Visual Design, Content
- Methods
- UX QA, competitive benchmarking, user interviews, in-app survey design
80%
of UX audit recommendations adopted
30%
shipped in later updates
4.5k
views on Quabbler Stories
3M+
organic reach across Quabble's growth efforts
Context
Quabble needed new users to feel its value quickly enough to become a paid member, and needed to rely less on expensive acquisition channels to get people in the door in the first place. Those are really two different problems that happened to live in the same company — one about the product, one about growth. I ended up working across both.
Product: closing the value gap
I started with a UX QA pass across the existing app — reviewing journeys the way a user actually experiences them, documenting friction, inconsistency, and moments where the app gave unclear or no feedback, then handing that to the product team to prioritize. Not glamorous work, but it's what turned "this needs a redesign" into a list someone could actually act on.
From there I worked on the UX design of onboarding and the paywall. Rather than guessing at what would convert better, I looked at how comparable products — journaling apps, digital healthcare tools, and Tolan, an AI companion built around emotional connection — introduced their value and built trust before asking for money.
We defined Quabble's "aha moment" as finishing a first mind workout, and the onboarding redesign aimed to get people there during onboarding itself, rather than asking them to subscribe on faith first.
A home-screen widget came out of this same research thread — informed by interviews where I asked users to walk me through how they actually used the app and where they typically opened it from — and contributed to retention.
Product outcome: 80% of recommendations from the UX QA pass were adopted for consideration by the product team, and about 30% shipped in later updates.
Growth: finding the right people without paying for all of them
In parallel, I was part of the team looking at customer lifetime value against acquisition cost. Early on, I proposed segmenting Quabble's users by how they behaved in the app rather than by demographics — a strong instinct, but one I hadn't backed with research yet. When engineering and the CEO asked how I knew, I didn't have a good answer, and the idea didn't move forward. That pushback is what led to designing an in-app survey in the first place — not to prove my personas right, but to actually find out who our users were instead of guessing. The findings broke an assumption we'd been carrying about our users' age range; they didn't end up validating the original personas, which stayed shelved. Proposing the idea before doing the work to support it meant it never got a fair test — a fix I'd make earlier next time, not just note after the fact.
There was a bigger question underneath the scholarship and partnership work that followed: Quabble wanted mental wellness support to stay accessible to people who needed it but couldn't pay for it, without undermining the case for paying at all. If the free and paid experiences felt too similar, people who could afford to subscribe would have less reason to. So alongside sponsor-funded scholarship memberships and healthcare-provider partnerships that gave people free access, the paid tier needed genuinely distinct features to differentiate itself — aimed at protecting the lifetime value of members who could pay, while keeping the door open for the ones who couldn't.
The piece I'm proudest of is Quabbler Stories, a YouTube series I led where real users shared their own experience with the app, animated by our designer rather than shot as talking-head video. It gave the brand a human voice, and it traveled — clips got reworked for Instagram, and users shared their own stories inside their networks. The series itself reached 4.5k views directly.
Growth outcome: Quabbler Stories reached 4.5k views. Separately, organic reach across Quabble's combined growth efforts — social marketing, content, and partnerships — passed 3M+ during this period; that figure reflects the wider team's work, mostly led by social marketing, with my content as one contribution to it rather than something I drove.
Takeaway
Working both sides of this taught me to see product experience and growth as one system rather than two separate jobs sitting next to each other. Fixing friction in the app made it easier to trust once someone opened it; the growth work decided who got the chance to open it in the first place. Neither fully explains the other, but neither works as well alone.