Designing a community engagement strategy that turned passive scrolling into meaningful connection
Marigold Health's community is designed for members to share and support one another throughout their recovery journey. However, most discussions required heavy involvement from our trained App Moderators, and members struggled to keep up with conversations due to a lack of threading and notifications. This led to superficial sharing and missed opportunities for deeper connection.
Through user research and stakeholder workshops, I led a systemic redesign of our key community touchpoints. Working closely with Product, Clinical, and our App Moderators, we transformed how members engage with and support one another.
Team: Senior Product Designer (me), Head of Product, 8 Engineers
Tools Used: Figma, Jira, Confluence, Google Forms, Mixpanel, AI-assisted design and ideation tools (ChatGPT, Recraft)
Platforms: iOS, Android, Web
Key Outcomes:
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+35% first-day community engagement
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+40% increased quality of sharing
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+90% increase in member NPS score
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4 new member-requested groups added
Note: The below case study is a curated overview of the work that can be shared publicly.
Additional research and process details are covered by NDA and available to discuss live.
🚧 Challenges
Despite the community experience being at the core of our app, we had several barriers to meaningful member-to-member discussions.
For example, our incentive program, group chat interface, and lack of in-app notifications all encouraged superficial content over deeper, ongoing discussions. Additionally, as an anonymous community, it was difficult for members to genuinely connect with one another. This put strain on our App Moderators to regularly promote productive conversations and ensure everyone felt supported in our community.
"I get so tired of everyone just posting 'Good Morning' instead of having real conversations. It's hard to connect with people who do that." —Member survey feedback
🎯 Goals
To address these challenges, I aimed to redesign the community experience to foster more authentic, member-driven engagement. This involved:
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Deeper member-to-member discussions: Encouraging more meaningful sharing and conversation between members, reducing reliance on moderators to spark discussions
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Better notifications: Making it easier for members to follow and return to conversations over time
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Opportunities to let some personality shine: Helping members connect with others who share similar experiences, even within an anonymous environment
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More safe spaces: Creating spaces where members with diverse identities could discuss topics specific to their experiences
💡 Solution
Through stakeholder workshops, a member survey, and close collaboration with Product, Clinical, and our App Moderators, I transformed the community experience through redesigned touchpoints and new features that fostered more authentic member engagement.
The new experience encouraged more meaningful sharing and made conversations easier to follow. I prioritized initiatives that balanced impact with technical constraints, including threaded discussions, an in-app notification center, expanded member profiles, realigned incentives, and new groups to support diverse identities. I also improved moderator tools to help them feature quality content and manage discussions more effectively.
The work was delivered across multiple sprints in partnership with engineering, with ongoing iteration based on feedback from both members and App Moderators. As a result, we saw a 40% increase in quality engagement, 100% positive feedback from our moderation team, and contributed to an overall 90% increase in member satisfaction.
Designs Highlights
IMPROVED SHARING
Encouraging more thoughtful sharing through post creation and content curation
Community posts were often low-effort and repetitive (e.g. "Good morning!"), driven in part by incentives and a lack of guidance around what or how to share.
I redesigned the post creation experience to provide clearer context, structure, and inspiration. This included more guidance for participation, updating post topic & tag categories, setting minimum character constraints, and adding the ability to feature high-quality posts.
Together, these changes helped shift the community away from transactional posting and toward more intentional, engaging dialogue (+40% improvement).
IN-APP NOTIFICATIONS
Supporting ongoing conversations with a centralized notification center
Previously, members had limited visibility into replies, reactions, or ongoing conversations, making it easy for engagement to drop off. I designed a centralized notification center that surfaces meaningful activity and provides clear pathways back into conversations.
This work required a comprehensive audit of our notification system. I eliminated redundant alerts, rewrote unclear copy, and implemented batching and timing logic to surface what matters without creating noise. The result is a feedback loop that drives sustained engagement while respecting members' attention.
IMPROVED COMMUNITY PROFILE
Encouraging meaningful connections in an anonymous community
I expanded member profiles to include richer bios, personal interests, and preferred support or recovery methods, giving members a way to express their identity without compromising anonymity. This added context helps members recognize shared experiences, discover common ground, and engage more intentionally with one another.
This newly collected data is an invaluable opportunity to learn more about our members and provide future personalization across the product.
📈 Outcomes
+40%
Increase in authentic sharing in the Forum (based on Omni AI analysis)
+35%
Month-over-month increase in first-day community engagement
4
New groups added based on member survey feedback
(e.g. Women Supporting Women, People of Color, LGBTQIA+)
+90%
Increase in member satisfaction (NPS) over the course of 2025
Beyond quantitative improvements in engagement and satisfaction, we also heard consistent qualitative feedback from App Moderators who are active in the community every day. They reported noticeable increases in the depth, quality, and authenticity of posts and discussions following each community improvement launch.
“People have been posting way more detailed venting, like members that I wouldn't expect to just like kind of lay it all out. And I feel like they finally have a space to where they're just like, OK, I can just kind of let this go.” — App Moderator
“People are posting about gratitude… it’s just such a different vibe, just like changing the words to something that people actually understand and resonate with.”
— Peer Manager
Note that a few of these initiatives launched recently, and while early signals are promising, longer-term metrics are still emerging.
💭 Reflections
This project reinforced how challenging it is to design for organic community growth, especially with a vulnerable population. The core tension in any social product is that people need content to engage, but content requires people to create it. I approached this by removing barriers to participation, thoughtfully applying behavioral psychology through incentives, and creating feedback loops without manipulating or forcing engagement.
Complex systemic work like this requires time to design, build, and see behavioral change. We saw some immediate improvements (post quality jumped, featured content went from <3 responses to 30+ comments), but features like expanded member profiles need longer to show impact. Unfortunately, funding constraints led to layoffs shortly after launch, limiting our ability to iterate and socialize new features or use member data to make smarter recommendations.
I'm proud of the foundation we established. The notification center, threaded discussions, and new community spaces created infrastructure for sustained growth, and I left behind practices like auditing events to maximize participation. While additional features I designed (a new home page and recovery tracker) hadn't launched before I left, I'm confident the work set the product up for continued evolution.
“Meira brings deep thoughtfulness and empathy to every design. She sweats the details, asks the right questions, and always keeps the end user in mind.
Beyond her design craft, Meira made a meaningful impact across the company. She collaborated across functions, shaped the language and tone of our product, influenced culture, and consistently went above and beyond her role."
Manager, Head of Product, Marigold Health
