Today View
& Plans.
Redesigning the daily entry point for one of the world's most-used Bible apps. The goal wasn't features, it was habit. Making showing up feel effortless, personal, and worth doing again tomorrow.
I led end-to-end design for this feature as the sole designer — user research, wireframes, and final production design — working alongside 1 PM and the engineering team from problem definition through launch.
Millions of installs.
But were people coming back?
"What makes someone come back every day? Three drivers stood out: streaks and consistency, emotional relevance, and low-friction entry points."
Research insight · YouVersion Today View
Designing for the returning user.
Streaks drive return
Consistency cues reduced drop-off at the critical Day-2 and Day-7 thresholds.
Emotional relevance
Content matched to emotional state — anxious, hopeful, grieving — engaged deeper and longer.
One clear next action
Too many choices created paralysis. One obvious path per session drove completion.
Plans as commitment
Framing enrollment as a personal commitment, not a content browse, showed stronger follow-through.
Before I zoom in,
I zoom out.
Left to right: immersive full-screen verse · light, editorial layout with speaker stories · focused single verse with video devotional
One session.
One meaningful action.
Moved the streak front and center so users could see their progress the moment they opened the app. Showing up became something worth acknowledging.
Replaced browse-style Plan listing with editorial, emotion-led categorization. Anxiety, hope, purpose — meeting users where they actually are.
The daily video devotional was buried behind a verse image and hard to discover. A heatmap study gave us the answer: show a person. Swapping the verse image for the speaker thumbnail drove nearly 50% more taps. Simple change, real signal.
What didn't work
Our first solution used a looping video preview of the speaker. Early signal was strong. But at scale the cost appeared: infrastructure overhead and a poor experience on 3G. A static thumbnail with a play button was the right call — same emotional pull, without the bandwidth cost.
What shipped.
In production.
Production screens · YouVersion Bible App · Today View & Plans
17% of users.
100% of the depth.
Before
Redesign · Light
What moved
Meeting people where they already are.
One of the most meaningful shifts was in how users found Plans. Surfacing felt needs at the top of the Plans experience turned out to be exactly right. Users don't open the app thinking "I want a 7-day reading plan." They open it feeling anxious, or hopeful, or lost. Meeting them at that emotional entry point changed everything. Searching by feeling became one of the most used paths into content.
Next release: active, search, and saved plans — in one gesture.