Rebuilding the Focus Coach’s End of Session Experience

It's a guided study timer that helps students stay on task while doing their work by periodically checking in on them.

39.3% of our users were one and done after completing their first session – meaning almost 2 in 5 of our users completed a single Focus Session and then abandoned the tool.

Every session ended with a brief "session complete" animation, a 1–100 reflection slider, and an MVP-state completion screen built around a check-in graph. We’d assumed students would rack up check-ins, but most sessions only had one or two, which meant the graph had little value.

A survey we sent out to students asked: "If you could earn badges or unlock levels by completing more sessions, would that make you want to use the Focus Coach more?" Roughly half said yes and another third said maybe.

I audited the end-of-session experiences for six of the biggest mindfulness and timer apps. The best experiences used the end of a session as an opportunity to celebrate the user and promote future engagement. Something ours failed to do.

Our survey showed that students supported the idea of badges and rewards, and the competitive audit found that similar applications used gamification. But despite that, full gamification wasn't something I recommended: Finding Focus exists to help students genuinely improve their focus, not to collect rewards. The moment a badge becomes the reason a student starts a session, the tool is failing at its actual job.

Without wanting to lean too heavily into gamification, I proposed four kinds of content we could show: cumulative milestones, personal bests, streaks, and course quotes.

My team was in full support so I got to work creating designs and a spec sheet of the full system – trigger logic, thresholds, priority rules, and the copy.

The original idea was to rotate through different content on the completion screen and show whatever was relevant to the session a user just completed, so the page always had something fresh to show.

The idea for a completion page that rotated through different content worked in theory, but once I began creating mockups it became clear that the design wasn’t working.

That’s when I realized the best experience would be a guided end-of-session flow where each piece of content - if it was triggered - had its own dedicated screen and a purposeful animation.

The redesign does three jobs: acknowledge the session has ended, provide context on what was accomplished, and allow users to quickly reflect.

In order to elevate the experience I created three different vector illustrations to distinguish the three different achievements. I was then able to animate the illustrations using CSS Keyframes with the help of Claude Code.

All-time stats count up odometer style, showing users how this session added to their all-time progress. Below the stats container sits one of two containers: a week tracker or a course quote. If it is the first session of the day then the week tracker is shown, if not then the course quote container is shown.

Since this project launched in July (2026), when most students are out of school and classroom usage is naturally lower, we do not have enough data to draw any conclusions yet. To determine if we successfully improved the end of session experience, I set up clear goals to track performance for the Fall semester.