Mochi Sanctuary

Before forming any opinion about the existing prototype, we needed to understand how young adults actually relate to emotional wellness in daily life. 10 in-depth interviews were conducted with participants aged 22–29 – not to evaluate the app, but to understand what drives someone to start tracking their mood, what makes them stick with it, and what quietly causes them to stop.

Five consistent themes emerged – and together they became the lens through which every feature in the existing prototype would be evaluated.

The interviews revealed two archetypes who would come to Mochi Sanctuary for different reasons and need very different things from it. The Social Processor needed the app to feel connected to the people in their life. The Reluctant Reflector needed it to be effortless enough to become a habit. Designing for one without alienating the other became a core constraint for everything that followed.

With a clear picture of what users needed, the gaps in the existing prototype became specific. These four HMW questions each mapped to something users had explicitly told us wasn't working – and each one would later be answered by a specific design decision in the redesign.

With a clear picture of what users needed, the same 10 participants were asked to complete four tasks in the existing prototype. The results confirmed what the interviews had signalled: the concept was right, but specific decisions were creating friction at exactly the points where users most needed ease.

The mood quadrant, the mandatory entry, the clinical language in the Analyse tab – each created a barrier at a moment where the app should have been working with users, not against them. To understand whether these patterns held up beyond a single session, we needed to see how the app fared in real life, over time.

A usability test captures what users think in the moment. A beta test captures whether they choose to keep using something once the novelty wears off. 28 participants aged 18–29 used the existing prototype in their daily lives for a full week, generating 167 responses. The question wasn't whether they could complete tasks – it was whether the app was earning a place in their routine.

The numbers captured the gap precisely. An 81% task completion rate confirmed the app was usable. A 2.05/5 likelihood-to-continue score confirmed it wasn't yet meaningful. Users could use Mochi Sanctuary – they just weren't choosing to come back.

The beta also made clear what users did connect with – and protecting those moments was just as important as addressing what wasn't working. The redesign would need to build on what users valued while removing the friction that was pushing them away.

Every change in the redesign traces back to a specific user need. The features that changed were creating friction. The features that stayed were the ones users had explicitly told us mattered.

The existing mood log asked users to place themselves on a quadrant plotting energy against mood valence. In testing, 4 in 10 users found this unintuitive – energy and emotion are not the same thing, and separating them added cognitive load. The emotion wheel starts where users actually are – with the feeling itself – and lets them move from a broader category down to something more specific if they want to.

Half of all test participants were frustrated by the mandatory 5-word journal entry. For a mental wellness app, gating a mood log behind a written requirement sends the wrong message: it turns a moment of self-reflection into a task to complete. Users told us they wanted the option to express what they were feeling – not the obligation to explain it. The 5-word minimum was removed entirely. Reflection is now optional, and available in whatever form suits the moment: words, a photo, a voice memo, or a drawing.

The Analyse tab scored well for ease of use in the beta (4.43/5), which confirmed users wanted what it was offering. But in usability testing, terms like "arousal" and "valence" created distance, and the multi-chart layout required users to do interpretive work – the opposite of what emotional insight should feel like. Users told us they wanted to feel like the app understood them, not that they had to understand the app. The redesigned Insights tab was built around that: renamed to reduce clinical distance, charts simplified, and every data point paired with a plain-language summary that translates emotional patterns into something a user can actually make sense of.

Connection was the clearest retention signal across the research. Users were far more motivated to log their mood when a friend was involved – not to share data, but to feel like they were doing something together. The Daily Raid had been built to create that sense of shared engagement, but it was tonally mismatched with a mental wellness context and poorly understood in testing. What users actually needed was something that felt like quiet support, not competition. The shared garden replaced it: tending to something together, Mochi gently reflecting a user's mood to their friends, and a low-pressure way to check in – a small note, sent without having to announce how you're feeling.

Individual improvements only go so far if moving between them feels fragmented. Users visiting the mood log, Insights, and social features daily needed to feel like they were inside one coherent app – not switching between tools that happened to share a home screen. Unnecessary steps were removed at the points users visit most often, and all Mochi-related interactions were centralised within a dedicated sanctuary space – making the companion feel like a continuous part of the experience rather than a standalone element.

6 participants – a mix of returning beta testers and new users – tested the redesigned prototype on the same tasks. The goal was to confirm that the changes had addressed the specific needs and friction points the earlier research had surfaced.

Mood logging went from 0% success to 100% – the emotion wheel had resolved the confusion the quadrant created. Memory Jar errors dropped from 10% to 0%. The Insights tab, once inaccessible to users without a psychology background, became one of the most positively received features in testing. The Friends feature achieved a 33% success rate with 67% partial – strong enough to confirm the need was real, and specific enough to identify where onboarding for the dew drop mechanic still needed work.

User feedback confirmed the redesign had addressed the usability problems. But for a mental wellness app, usability is a floor, not a ceiling. We brought in Rachna, a practicing psychotherapist, to review both prototypes – not to validate what we'd done, but to pressure-test whether the emotional model behind the design was clinically sound.

Her most important observation was one that applied beyond this project: too many wellness apps focus on surfacing how users feel without helping them do something about it. For someone logging a difficult emotion, having that reflected back with no guidance on what to do next can leave them worse off than before they opened the app. That gap led directly to the addition of breathing exercises and grounding techniques as contextual responses to mood logs – practical, therapist-informed prompts that give users something to act on in the moment, not just a label for what they're feeling.

The final design resolved every friction point the research had surfaced, incorporated Rachna's clinical guidance, and preserved everything users had told us they genuinely valued in the original. The result served both archetypes: effortless enough for the Reluctant Reflector to build into a routine, connected enough for the Social Processor to have a reason to return.