Glorify

Available on the app store

Designing community from 0-1 to transform Glorify from a solo devotional app into a shared faith experience.

Lead Product Designer

 
 

🎯 The Problem

Glorify is a Christian devotional app helping millions build daily faith habits through prayer, scripture, and reflection.

Engagement data revealed low average session lengths, as most users dropped off after completing the daily devotion on the Today tab and doing some chapter reading in the bible. The devotional gave users value, but it was a single, one-and-done interaction. There wasn’t much else pulling them back, which kept DAU/MAU ratios flat.

To better understand engagement, I went beyond the numbers and spoke directly with users about how they were experiencing the app day to day.

 

🔍 Insights

Tackling this problem meant digging deeper into how people actually practiced their faith, not only on Glorify but in their daily life. I spoke with a range of Glorify users, and each conversation highlighted a different friction point.

 
 

Synthesizing these conversations (through empathy maps and theme clustering) revealed clear patterns: users craved connection, accountability, and spaces to share their faith journey, not just consume content alone. Research revealed that while users valued the daily devotional, there was a crucial product gap:

Faith is communal but our product wasn’t.

From the research, I distilled everything down into three key insights that highlighted where new opportunities for community could emerge.

 
 

🌱 The Opportunity

I took those key insights and turned them into ‘How might we’ statements, actively reframing them as opportunities to design more communal experiences within Glorify, giving users more meaningful ways to spend additional time in the app, which was one of our goals from the start.

How Might We…

  • Make the quiet parts of faith feel witnessed? (Presence)

  • Create moments that turn solo practice into a shared experience? (Shared Rhythms)

  • Show users faith in action to inspire deeper understanding and practice? (Fellowship)

 

🧪 Speed to Signals…

I translated the ‘How Might We’ statements into quick, actionable design ideas, focusing on signals, not scale. Optimized for learning over perfection, fast iterations > full builds.

I designed and introduced lightweight experiments and prototypes to select user segments to validate and test each of the themes we uncovered.

Early prototypes of Bible comments & highlights

 

Early flows and WIP shots of Glorify Community tab.

 

🧪 …Signals to Design Strategy


This approach let us learn fast, gather real user feedback, and refine direction. We learned where users leaned in, and where they didn’t.

We rolled out these refined designs in phases, only moving to the next layer of community once we had validated the previous one with real user usage data.

✔️ Phase 1 - Presence
Add comments and highlights on the Bible so users could feel like they’re reading alongside others.


✔️ Phase 2 - Shared spiritual rhythms
Let users post insights, prayers, and reflections, turning the solo moment of daily devotional into an opt-in shared practice.


✔️ Phase 3 - Fellowship
Give users a space to reflect, respond, and walk with others by invite only.

 

🎨 Final Solutions + Designs

The groundwork from early signals gave me clarity and confidence, making it easy to bring the full features to life within the application.

 

🚀 Impact

  • Average dwell time per chapter more than doubled, 1m12s → 2m49s

  • Users who reacted to a community bible verse were 4.2x more likely to return within 48 hours, clear signals that presence drove deeper engagement and repeat use.

 

Average time spent on the Daily Devotional card increased by 41% after comments and prayer-sharing were introduced.

 

DAU climbed from ~220K to ~280K in the first quarter after introducing our full suite of Community features.

 

✨ Reception

Feedback on the new community feature was overwhelmingly positive, with many users saying it made their devotion feel less solitary and added a new way to practice faith in the app. Even Khloé Kardashian highlighted the feature on an Instagram post, bringing a surge of visibility, validation and new users.

 
 

✅ Conclusion

The community features turned Glorify from a one-way devotional tool into a more social, shared practice, helping users feel less alone in their faith and boosting DAU/MAU as people invited friends to join the shared experience.

This project underscored that faith is inherently communal and by designing with that truth in mind, we not only created a more authentic spiritual experience but also drove deeper engagement and retention for the product.