User Engagement Project
JoinLinks Inc.
My Role: Co-Founder, Product Manager, Product Designer, UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer
Project Duration: 1 year
What was the context?
JoinLinks is a social app & website that began as an attempt to make meeting new people and finding things to do in a large city less daunting. Our core team consisted of 4 Los Angeles transplants who had built a community in LA and wanted to help others do the same. After 2 years of researching, designing, and testing we officially launched in 2023 and gained a few hundred users. In 2024, with a better marketing push and viral campaigns on TikTok and Instagram, we secured an additional 2,000 users. While exciting, we still weren't seeing as much activity across the app as we expected. We wanted that to change in 2025.
What was the problem?
User data indicated that engagement was extremely low and most user sessions lasted only a few minutes with large gaps of time before the initiation of another session. ​The lack of interaction and engagement with events (called “Links” on our app) suggested to us that users might be using our app to find interesting things to do and then exiting and making their plans elsewhere. This meant only one of the objectives for our app was being met, while our additional objective to be a platform where people could make new friends and coordinate plans with others was not happening at all.
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We needed users to spend a lot more time on the app and we needed features that enticed them to do so.
What was my approach?
After brainstorming with the full team about the different features we could add to increase engagement, I took the following steps to bring forth the next iteration of the app:
1
Created a user behavior survey and conducted a series of 4 small in-person group interviews to get a feel for how users were using our app, as well as some of their frustrations. During the sessions I previewed mockups I had designed in Figma to gauge which changes our users thought would improve their experience versus which changes they found inconsequential
2
Distilled feedback and insights from the interview sessions to determine which features we should actually create, then worked with Business Operations and our Developer to prioritize the features that could be most impactful and were most feasible to build in the coming months given our very small team and limited resources. The features we decided to implement were:
Live Feed
A "timeline" for users to make plans with others in real-time, ask questions, and post live updates on the events they are attending
Communities
A place for users to connect around shared interests with the ability to chat with each other and organize Links regularly
Badges
A gamifying profile feature to help generate excitement around attaining status and competing with other users
3
Developed objectives & key results (OKRs) to formally define our objectives, align our features, and establish targeted outcomes that would provide a measuring stick to later evaluate whether the features we added were successful
4
Built the product roadmap for the major features and minor modifications we chose to incorporate by weighing the time requirement for each feature against the potential positive impact on our stated objectives. I presented the roadmap to the team and negotiated final changes to begin the actual design & coding process
5
Designed the features and full user flows within Figma, working very closely with our Developer to make sure that my design approach balanced a nice visual aesthetic with ease of coding
6
Adopted an agile development process and held weekly meetings to discuss roadblocks and to talk through any design aspects that could be modified or simplified to help us ship quickly while maintaining high design quality. Our clear & honest communication allowed us to stay on schedule and ultimately move to the testing phase quicker than expected
7
Conducted significant UAT testing before shipping the new features. Once we shipped, we interacted with our users both in person and over the app to gauge their experience and push critical updates
PROJECT GALLERY*
*Please note, the gallery photos are for illustration purposes only and cannot be used or repurposed without expressed written consent.
 RFP Process DiagramAn example of the process diagrams I created to outline the existing user journey for each core process |  Main Database InterfaceThe user interface for the Database, which featured sections that were intuitively grouped by function as well as an easily accessible button to quickly email the weekly pipeline report to everyone |  Sample Report PageAn example of the clean, organized report pages that could be generated with the click of button. |
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What was the outcome?
Surpassed our new user targets. We gained more than 3,000 new users by the end of 2025 for a grand total of 5,700 users, surpassing our initial goal of 5,000 total
Increased our active user totals. We grew from 3 daily, 10 weekly, and 30 monthly active users in 2024 to 75 daily, 244 weekly, and 452 monthly active users in 2025 – demonstrating staggering growth. The features we added were instrumental in keeping users coming back to our app.
Considerably increased user engagement. We onboarded 70+ communities, with more than 2,000 users joining at least one community. This well exceeded our initial goal of onboarding 30 Communities with 500 users joining at least one community. Live Feed also became one of our most beloved features, with more than 7,000 posts, comments and likes from.
Received glowing positive feedback and reviews from our users! We received multiple 5-star reviews in both the Google & Apple app stores. One of our users noted that our app felt like “the new ACTUAL social media”. This felt like a huge win for us because it is exactly what we were aiming for in our product vision & mission.