CASE STUDY
Healing the MyTree learning loop.
Leading UX and Learning Experience design on a gamified climate education app, replacing a punitive game mechanic with a growth-oriented recovery loop grounded in cognitive science.
ROLE
UX & LX Lead
FOCUS
Gamification · Learning Design
DOMAIN
Climate Education
STATUS
Preparing for summer beta
THE GOAL
Climate literacy as a tangible, growing thing.
MyTree is a gamified climate education app built to encourage long-term sustainability habits through interactive learning. It addresses a gap in the climate tech market: the distance between abstract environmental data and the day-to-day behavior of individuals.
Users grow a virtual tree by answering climate trivia correctly. Trees that mature graduate into a "Tree Farm" dashboard, building a visual record of what each user has learned over time.
TEAM DYNAMIC
Leading the learning design layer
On a multidisciplinary fellowship team, I owned the intersection of behavioral psychology, instructional design, and user retention, translating cognitive science principles like spaced repetition and active retrieval into buildable user flows.
WHAT I OWNED
Instructional design
User retention strategy
Core gameplay mechanics
Learning loop architecture
Translating cognitive science (spaced repetition, active retrieval) into buildable flows
THE UX FRICTION
When the game was punishing the learner
FRICTION 01
Punitive mechanic
User research surfaced that players felt discouraged when their tree shrank after a wrong answer, and that discouragement was translating into drop-off. The penalty mechanic, originally designed to raise the stakes of learning, was working against retention.
THE SOLUTION
The "Tree Healing" mechanic
I proposed a product pivot, replacing the shrinking penalty with a growth-oriented recovery loop. When a user misses a question, the tree enters a visual "thirsty" state instead of losing progress. The missed question enters a backend queue to reappear a few turns later as a "Healing Opportunity," letting the user earn back their growth streak by getting it right.
This user flow maps out the "Tree Healing" mechanic, illustrating how an incorrect answer shifts the tree into a visual "thirsty" state and queues the question to reappear as a recovery opportunity at the end of the session.
NEXT STEPS & PROJECT IMPACT
A new design baseline.
Establishing the design baseline
The "Tree Healing" flow shifted the product direction from a punitive mechanic to a supportive recovery experience. These design assets are now consolidated into the central Figma repository to serve as the baseline UX pattern for the summer beta launch.
Influencing the learning strategy
Introducing this recovery loop opened up broader team discussions around instructional design, leading to decisions like interleaving quiz topics and adding optional lifelines for user scaffolding.
Transitioning to development
The project is now moving into implementation, with a new Project Manager taking over team coordination and the development team building backend data structures to track user progress against the recovery logic.