Crafting Yazio's meaningful habit loops
People don’t open a nutrition app because of features.
They open it because they’re trying — again — to build a healthier life.
At YAZIO, one of the world’s most successful nutrition platforms, habit formation isn’t a side effect. It’s the product. My focus was to design the behavioral and habit loops that turn intention into repetition — and repetition into long-term change.
Impact
Contributed to a product serving 90M+ users across 150+ countries.
Strengthened Day-1 Activation through clearer feedback loops.
Built end-to-end initiatives, with a focus on Growth and Core experience, resulting in an 80% Year-over-Year growth in DAU.
Increased engagement, reflected in higher return rates and food tracking activity.
Co-led the experimentation AB testing framework, from micro-optimizations to new full concepts.
Drove gamification and onboarding improvements to strengthen retention.
Contributed to scaling design systems and growth processes.
Company
Yazio
Year(s)
2024-25
Role
Senior Product Designer
We approached growth and retention with a systems mindset. Not by adding features, but by designing mechanisms that reward consistency, reduce friction, and strengthen intrinsic motivation. And, instead of thinking in screens, we thought in cycles: How does logging feel on day one? What happens on day seven? Why does someone return on day thirty?
Experimentation as a mindset
Through cross-functional workshops, AB test experimentation, and tight collaboration with PM, devs and analysts, we translated behavioral science into gamification systems, onboarding improvements, and iterative feature releases. Every loop was stress-tested through data. Every reward calibrated to reinforce intrinsic motivation — not dependency.
Alongside product work, I helped scale experimentation practices. The goal wasn’t just better features — it was a more mature, growth-driven product culture.
Because meaningful habits aren’t built through pressure. They’re built through well-designed systems that make consistency feel achievable.
trigger → action → feedback → reward
Opportunity space: Streaks as main retention driver
Streaks quickly stood out to me as one of the strongest retention drivers — but also one of the most fragile.
They work because they create continuity and commitment. But the moment a streak breaks, that same mechanism can backfire. I saw users lose momentum not because they didn’t care, but because the system made progress feel binary — you’re either “on track” or starting over.
So instead of pushing streaks harder, I focused on making them more resilient. I explored ways to soften that all-or-nothing dynamic, introducing recovery moments and reinforcing progress beyond perfect consistency. The goal was to shift streaks from pressure to support — helping users stay engaged even when life gets in the way.
Opportunity space: Making tracking loops meaningful
Tracking is the core behavior at YAZIO — but repetition alone doesn’t build habits, right?
In this sense we noticed that for many users, tracking could become mechanical. They were doing the action, but not necessarily connecting it to progress. That gap between effort and meaning was where motivation started to drop.
So I focused on strengthening that loop. Every action needed to generate feedback that felt useful and relevant — not just numbers, but insight. What changed? What does this mean for me? What should I do next?
The goal was to turn tracking from a task into a feedback system — something that helps users understand their behavior and feel progress over time.
One of the feature that I designed in this direction together with my team was the tracking loop, where users will receive a feedback in context after executing a meaningful action for their healthy diet, e.g. tracking food categorized as a high in vitamins.
Opportunity space: Extending habit loops beyond core tracking
Habit loops don’t stop at tracking — but in many cases, that’s where we were focusing them.
I started to look at where else these loops could live across the experience. Moments like the end of the year, where engagement typically drops, or onboarding, where users are still learning how to use the product. These are very different contexts, but they share the same challenge: maintaining momentum.
For example, the “year in review” became an opportunity to reframe a low-engagement period into a moment of reflection and reinforcement — helping users see progress over time, not just recent performance.
At the same time, we explored how to bring the value of tracking earlier into onboarding. Instead of teaching users how the product works first, I focused together with my team on showing them early in the journey— reducing the learning curve by connecting actions to outcomes from the start.
Bonus: Re-branding YAZIO
As YAZIO kept growing, it became clear to me that the product had evolved faster than the brand.
We were already helping millions of users build healthier habits, but the overall experience still felt more functional than engaging. The rebrand became an opportunity to close that gap — to better reflect what the product had become.
Together with Koto agency and my team, I contributed to shaping a direction that felt more human, more approachable, and more aligned with the idea that healthy habits should be sustainable, not restrictive. That meant evolving not just visuals, but tone and overall product feel.
Together we manage to achieve a rebranding that made the experience feel as supportive and motivating as the habits we were trying to help users build.
