self initiated
Vitals — Wellness App
Designing a Calming, Human-Centered Health Tracking Mobile Experience
- Role
- UI/UX Designer — Visual Direction, Data Visualization Design, Interaction Patterns, and Usability Validation.
- Scope
- Onboarding flow, daily dashboard, nutrition and workout tracking, progress visualizations, goal-setting screens, notification preferences, and settings — all designed for both iOS and Android with platform-appropriate patterns.
- Timeline
- 8 weeks
- Category
- Mobile Application
Overview
A health-tech startup entering a crowded market had one clear differentiator: they believed wellness tracking should reduce anxiety, not increase it. Their founding thesis was that calmer interfaces lead to more consistent long-term engagement.
Challenge
Competing wellness apps treated user data like financial dashboards — dense, numbers-forward, and implicitly judgmental. Users who missed a goal felt discouraged and often stopped tracking entirely within two weeks.
Objective
Design a tracking experience where daily engagement feels gentle and sustainable. Progress should be visible without pressure, and missed days shouldn't feel like failures. Increase 30-day user retention by 40% Create an anxiety-free, encouraging health tracking interface Achieve a 90%+ positive sentiment rating in beta testing
Approach
Read seven competing wellness apps for the moments where tracking turns into judgement — streak counters, red states, missed-day language. Defined a visual language of soft shapes and ambient colour against those specific failures, then prototyped three ways of showing progress as a trend rather than a score.
Selected decisions
Replaced sharp bar charts with rounded, gradient-filled progress rings that feel less clinical. Designed a 'calm mode' that hides numeric targets entirely and shows progress as gentle color shifts. Every palette choice was tested for emotional tone — not just contrast ratios — because color in health apps carries psychological weight.
Responsibilities
Competitor Usability & Anxiety Audits Soft-Gradient & Organic Data Visualization Design 'Calm Mode' Experience Architecture iOS & Android Mobile Prototypes
Deliverables
High-fidelity mobile screens for iOS and Android, interactive prototypes for onboarding and daily tracking flows, a soft gradient-based visual system with documented color rationale, data visualization component specs, and animation guidelines.
Outcome
The exercise produced a daily check-in model that asks for one thing at a time, a progress view built on trends rather than raw numbers, and a component and state system for the calm-mode variant. It is a design exercise: nothing was released and no one has used it.
Reflection
The most impactful decision wasn't a visual one — it was choosing to hide pressure-inducing numbers by default. Letting users opt into data density at their own pace respected their emotional boundaries and kept them coming back.