Cuckoo

01 — The product problem

Getting people to actually take the break

Cuckoo brings the benefits of recess back into the workday — a social, gamified wellbeing app that gets people moving through short, guided breaks, challenges, and a bit of friendly competition with colleagues. The core design problem was retention: how do you get someone to come back for a 3-minute break every day, on purpose, without the app feeling naggy or gimmicky?

I led UI/UX design on this project as Lead Designer — directing the overall system and working alongside two junior designers, reviewing their flows, setting the visual and interaction standards, and making sure the playful brand voice (the Cuckoo bird mascot, warm illustration style) stayed consistent across registration, onboarding, the challenges dashboard, and the notification system.

Cuckoo has since grown from a consumer wellbeing app into an AI-powered workability platform for organizations — helping HR teams reduce sick leave, increase engagement, and build a culture of recovery, with results reported directly into tools like Teams and Slack. The design foundations from this project — onboarding, registration, and the notification system — carried through as the product scaled from individual users to 200+ organizations.

02 — The UX challenge

Three problems, one shared constraint: don't lose the personality

• Get a new user from sign-up to their first completed break in as few steps as possible, without losing the personality that makes the brand feel different from a generic corporate wellness tool.
• Design an onboarding sequence that personalizes the experience (focus area, break frequency) without turning into a long, form-heavy setup wizard.
• Build a notification system that keeps people engaged with real-time, social moments — group breaks, friend activity — without becoming noisy or interruptive.

03 — The wrong instinct

The obvious version is a setup wizard. That's the problem.

The default way to personalize an experience like this is a form: ask for focus area, ask for break frequency, save, done. It's fast to build and it captures the same data. It's also exactly the corporate-tool feeling the brand was trying to avoid.

04 — Registration

Sell the product and get out of the way, in the same breath

Registration needed to do two jobs that usually fight each other: build enough trust to convince someone to sign up, and get through the form itself as fast as possible. The left panel carries the value proposition, pricing, a live product preview, and a testimonial — all the trust-building work — while the form itself stays short: name, email, password, with a company-code path for teams and one-tap social sign-in for anyone who wants to skip typing entirely.

Registration — minimal required fields, company-code entry, and social sign-in as parallel paths.

05 — Onboarding

Three short moments instead of one long form

This is where most of the design attention went. Rather than a single long setup form, onboarding is broken into three short, skippable moments layered over the real home screen.

1. Welcome — introduces the mascot and the value proposition, then gets out of the way with a single "Let's start!" CTA. No fields, no decisions.

2. Personalize the focus — Active, Stretch, or Balance, each with its own icon and plain-language description, plus a visible Skip.

3. Set a daily goal — Casual, Regular, or Serious, each mapped to a break count and paired with a different mascot pose. "You can always change this later" lowers the pressure of committing.

Across all three steps, the pattern stays consistent: one clear question, illustrated options over plain toggles, a visible skip path, and the real product visible in the background — so onboarding reads as a light introduction to the app rather than a gate in front of it.

06 — The key decision

One pattern, reused three times, instead of three different screens

07 — Notifications

A glanceable log and a real-time interrupt — not the same job

The notification system had to carry two different jobs at once: a persistent, glanceable log of social and scheduling activity, and real-time, in-the-moment prompts that pull people back into the app when something relevant is happening right now.

The notification panel groups activity by recency — This week, then Earlier — and mixes several types in one clear list: scheduled group breaks with countdowns ("starts in 5 minutes"), social reactions, friend requests, and comments, each with an avatar and a consistent time stamp. Grouping by "This week" keeps the panel from becoming an endless, undifferentiated feed.

Notification panel (grouped by recency) alongside a live communal-break prompt using the same illustration language as onboarding.

08 — Design system consistency

One mascot, one card language, everywhere

Onboarding, registration, and notifications now share one visual and tonal language — the same mascot, the same card and modal patterns — so the product feels considered end to end rather than assembled from separate flows. A single onboarding pattern (question + illustrated options + visible skip) scales to future preference screens without a new design decision every time, and grouped, avatar-led notifications keep social and scheduling activity legible even as the number of notification types grows.

As Lead Designer, standardizing these patterns early gave the two junior designers on the team a clear system to extend into challenges, community, and company screens without re-solving the same interaction problems each time.

09 — What HR leaders say

The same clarity, read differently by a different audience

As Cuckoo scaled into a workability platform for organizations, the same clarity built into onboarding and notifications became something HR teams could point to directly — the product is simple enough that adoption doesn't require training, and the habit-forming patterns from onboarding are what HR leaders now credit for actual, sustained use.

10 — Impact

What the early clarity work held up to

The result was a scalable, cohesive system that increased engagement clarity, reinforced motivation through visible progress, and aligned playful branding with strong UX structure. That same foundation now underpins a platform used by organizations at the scale below — evidence that the early clarity work held up as the product moved from individual users to enterprise HR teams.

11 — What's next

Where this pattern still needs testing

1. Question: Does the skip rate on onboarding steps change as the product adds more preference screens? Measure: Skip rate per step, tracked as new onboarding moments are added to the same pattern.
2. Question: Do the real-time communal-break interrupts get more or less effective as an organization's user count grows? Measure: Join rate on communal-break prompts, segmented by organization size.
3. Extend the same question-plus-skip pattern into the challenges and community screens the junior designers are now building on, and confirm it holds up outside the original three flows it was designed for.

12 — Contributions

What this project actually asked of me