CUSTOMER STORY
How Noom turned market research into a winning product
Noom ran surveys with 30,000+ respondents to validate a new mental wellness feature — and launched one of its highest-retention products.
OVERVIEW
Noom is the leading behavior change company, using meds and mindset for weight loss and health that lasts. As the company expanded beyond weight management into mental wellbeing, it needed to understand what would genuinely resonate with users. With SurveyMonkey, Noom validated new product experiences through customer research at scale, turning emotional insights into confident product decisions.
Validated a new mental wellness experience
Transformed emotional responses into product insights
Sustained 50% weekly retention with customer base
THE CHALLENGE
Understanding what genuinely moves people emotionally
A walk past a closed art museum sparked an idea. When Myles Johnson, Product Manager at Noom, and CEO Geoff Cook passed Princeton's art museum discussing the intersection of art and mental wellbeing, they wondered aloud: what if Noom could help users connect with positive emotions through digital art therapy?
The inspiration came from a simple place. But executing it required something more than inspiration.
Noom was building Mindful Art Break, an innovative feature designed to improve emotional well-being through guided art experiences. The feature would invite users to pause, reflect, and reconnect with positive emotions. But the real challenge was: How do you know which art will actually move people? Do people make it a point to surround themselves with things they find beautiful? How might this experience shift users’ perspective? Which themes resonate at which times of year?
The answers to these questions were the foundation of the entire feature.
Noom users would come to Mindful Art Break with their own unpredictable moments and emotional needs. Noom couldn't predict what each person needed. They could only listen to what people actually experienced.
That required rigorous and scaled research, along with a partner capable of managing complexity without sacrificing scientific integrity.
"When you're running a clinical study at this scale, it's not just about the sample size. It's about managing complexity without sacrificing the science. SurveyMonkey allowed us to do both."
Myles Johnson
Product Manager
Noom
THE ANSWER
Turning customer feedback into product confidence
Noom started small with surveys of a few hundred people, testing different approaches to art therapy. Using SurveyMonkey's survey design capabilities, they built questionnaires that tracked emotional state before and after viewing art. These smaller studies were less about validation and more about discovery. They revealed what questions mattered and shaped the vision of what Mindful Art Break could become proving the concept before scaling.
"We don't get anywhere without running the first few surveys with just a couple hundred users," Myles reflects. "That probably did more for the feature development than anything else."
Once the core questions were clear, Noom needed scale. SurveyMonkey's respondent panel provided access to a large, diverse pool, and the platform's audience targeting capabilities ensured a statistically sound sample. Using SurveyMonkey's advanced logic and branching features, the team managed a landmark study: 5,000 respondents viewing 50 pieces of art, with 100 people evaluating each piece. The methodology remained consistent across all cohorts, enabling direct comparison of emotional responses.
The data revealed clear patterns. Different artworks triggered different emotions across different demographics. Some pieces sparked awe, others calm, others fascination.
Noom didn't just need to know what art resonated. They needed to understand why, the emotional dimensions, the subtle patterns, the unexpected connections that wouldn't emerge from a simple ranking of scores. Using SurveyMonkey's advanced analytics tools, Myles and his team analyzed emotional dimensions in the data. Which emotions resonated with which artworks? What nuances did responses reveal that simple scores would miss? With these insights, Noom built a proprietary AI algorithm trained on real human emotional responses from the study. Its job wasn't to rank art by merit. It was to understand which emotions different pieces reliably evoked.
Myles continued to curate Mindful Art Break weekly, but now with intelligence from thousands of users. The algorithm didn't dictate choices. It informed them. "The point of scoring the art was not to say that this Monet piece is better than that piece," Myles explains. "It was to help us understand what emotions are really resonating with people when they see a given piece of art."
Noom’s research didn’t replace human judgment; rather, it amplified it. With momentum from the landmark study, Noom expanded to 25,000-30,000 respondents, gathering deeper data on how different populations responded to different artworks and themes. Each insight from SurveyMonkey's analytics shaped decisions about which artworks to include, how to describe them, and when to present them. Those human insights helped make Mindful Art Break an instant success.
"Market research keeps you humble. It's easy to project your own assumptions onto a feature, but research forces you to step back and listen. I went into this expecting our customers to tell us what the feature needed to become, not the other way around.”
Myles Johnson
Product Manager
Noom
THE RESULTS
Better research. Better decisions. Better products.
Noom scaled research from 100-person pilots to a 5,000-person study in 8 weeks. Soon after, it launched Mindful Art Break to thousands of Noom users. The feature won a Silver Stevie Award for New Product of the Year and was nominated for a Webby Award, one of the industry's highest honors for design and user experience.
The most compelling result, however, was behavioral. Mindful Art Break achieved a 50% weekly retention rate among 300,000+ members—a remarkable metric for a mental health feature. While comparisons to industry standards can vary by definition, this performance significantly outpaces the 3% day-30 retention typically seen in standalone mental health apps. Mindful Art Break sustaining majority weekly reuse with a 50% weekly retention rate for over a year underscores the power of research-driven design.
This outcome wasn't accidental. It was the direct result of every decision Noom made based on what SurveyMonkey's research revealed - which emotions people connected with, which artworks moved them, which descriptions helped them feel something. Every choice had been validated against real human responses gathered at scale.
The success of Mindful Art Break changed how Noom builds. Research, once a nice-to-have, became central to product development. The company now validates new ideas at scale before launch, asking users in depth before making decisions.
"This entire experience empowered us to continue using SurveyMonkey to stay curious about what our community needs next," Myles says. More importantly, Noom proved something fundamental: rigorous market research moves you toward something real fast. It accelerates you toward certainty.
"Curiosity is rocket fuel," Myles explains. "I think just using curiosity to kind of guide me to the right places and energize me to execute at a high level allows me to kind of keep the information overload away."
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