Mobile Apps

Key Mobile Design Strategies

Mobile app design requires a unique focus on user habits and continuous engagement to ensure lasting retention. Drawing from my experience, I’ve focused on creating mobile experiences that nurture positive user behaviors through personalized notifications, onboarding processes, and habit-forming features. By integrating thoughtful design elements, I aim to guide users toward consistent app usage, leveraging push notifications and reminders to keep them engaged without overwhelming them.

In my recent work, I refined the mobile onboarding process to make it intuitive and rewarding, ensuring users were quickly motivated to adopt the app. I also implemented notification strategies that balanced helpful reminders with actionable insights, fostering an ongoing connection with users. These efforts were instrumental in creating an app that feels engaging, rewarding, and essential to users, ultimately driving both retention and active participation over time.

Rewards

Takuma Kakehi

Extra-gamified: why are some apps so satisfying?

According to Statista, an average of 6,140 apps were released in Play Store everyday in the first quarter of 2018. Yet, 77% of users never returned to the app after 72 hours of installing it...

Takuma Kakehi

Understanding freemium models with the free cookie clicker — a UX analysis

Do you remember Cookie Clicker, an addictive web game that let you click on a cookie to make more cookies? After this was released in 2013 by a French programmer, Julien Thiennot...

Notifications

Takuma Kakehi

Get Users Onboard with Your Push Notifications

Push notifications are an essential tool for bringing users back into apps. According to Invesp, sending push notifications can boost app engagement by up to 88%, whereas 65% of users...

Takuma Kakehi

Highlight the Most Important Messages — Grouped Notifications

A lot of Android users might have been making fun of iOS notifications until iOS12 was released when the grouping function was introduced for notifications in WWDC 2018...

Quartz - Social News App

Quartz is a community-driven news platform designed to boost user retention and engagement by creating a space where users stay updated on global news while sharing insights with a trusted community. The app offers features for story personalization, commenting, and curation, fostering meaningful user interactions. In my role, I focused on simplifying the mobile experience by refining the "Pick" feature, enhancing the onboarding process, and optimizing push notifications. These improvements encouraged a more engaging and intuitive mobile experience, ultimately driving higher retention and active user participation.

2018 - 2020

Quartz

Social News App (iOS, Android)

Conversion improvement: Implementing various UI patterns in two-week cycles to analyze their impacts.
Retention enhancements: Introducing a mechanism for users to provide feedback and operations for users to receive reactions to their contributions.
Design systems: Developing design systems that needed to evolve through the merger and rebranding process.

I managed Quartz app's social platform integration project

SHOPEST - Retail Engagement Platform

SHOPPEST is a platform designed to drive user engagement by bridging the online and offline shopping experience. The app focuses on attracting users to physical retail locations while providing convenient online shopping as a supplementary feature. With features that help users discover new products, locate stores, and earn rewards, SHOPPEST enhances the retail experience for both customers and businesses. In my role, I concentrated on developing intuitive UI elements, refining the discovery process, and designing engagement mechanisms to increase foot traffic to partner stores. These efforts resulted in a more seamless user experience, ultimately boosting in-store engagement and retention.

2018

SHOPEST

Product Designer

SHOPEST is a mobile app designed to elevate users' shopping experiences through location-based alerts for nearby events, sales, and stores. As a product designer, my primary focus was on refining the app's interface to reflect its unique concept of location-based shopping experiences and integrating smart UI features. For example, within the app's online shopping segment, sales at physical stores or recommended nearby stores were emphasized, encouraging users to explore these brick-and-mortar shops.

View project detail

With Shopest app, I led integrating the online shopping experience into the original store finder app.

GoKid - Carpool Management App

GoKid is a community-driven carpooling app designed to simplify transportation for families and schools, offering a reliable way to manage shared rides for kids. With features like real-time tracking, ride scheduling, and in-app communication, GoKid aims to ease logistical challenges while enhancing safety and convenience. In my role, I focused on refining the user flow for scheduling rides, optimizing the notification system, and enhancing the map interface for improved route visualization. These enhancements contributed to a smoother, more user-friendly experience, fostering greater trust and increased adoption among families and schools.

2017-2018

GoKid

UI Designer

GoKid is a mobile carpool-sharing app designed for parents to coordinate their kids' transportation to school and after-school activities with their trusted families and friends. The app allows parents to discover and share available carpools, manage schedules, and track waiting vehicles. In my role as a UI designer, I collaborated with product managers and UX researchers to conceptualize UI designs, analyzed with user testing to refine the designs, and oversaw the creation and management of exportable design assets.

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For GoKid, a mobile carpool-sharing app for parents, I performed as a UI designer for its mobile and web app.

WSJ What's News - Experimental News App

The Wall Street Journal's What's News app was developed as an experimental news platform to test innovative features and enhance user engagement with personalized news updates. Designed for rapid iteration, the app introduced interactive elements and streamlined user flows, aiming to keep users informed in a quick, accessible format. In my role, I led the design of wireframes to communicate new ideas across teams, established design guidelines to simplify engineering, and implemented user-friendly features like snackbars, error handling, and instructional animations. These enhancements ensured a smoother, more intuitive experience, ultimately facilitating WSJ's exploration of new ways to engage readers.