User Research
To ensure Life addressed real user needs, I conducted extensive research focused on understanding the target audience and identifying gaps in the existing health tracking market. This phase was critical, as I was not the end-user, and building an app that resonated required deep empathy and user insights.
Research Methods
Competitive Analysis: Downloaded and analyzed every health tracking app on the App Store, purchasing upgrades to benchmark functionality, user flows, and feature gaps.
App Store Reviews: Studied hundreds of reviews to uncover common frustrations, unmet needs, and feature requests directly from users.
User Interviews: Conducted interviews with individuals who tracked their health to understand their workflows, challenges, and priorities.
Secondary Research: Reviewed market trends and studies on women’s health tracking to ensure the app aligned with broader user expectations and behaviors.
Key Insights
Desire for Customization: Users consistently voiced the need to track data unique to their health situations, such as specific symptoms, moods, and habits.
Navigation Simplicity: Many users found existing apps overly complex, making quick data entry a challenge.
Communication Gaps: Users wanted to easily share their logged data with doctors, but existing tools lacked exportable reports or meaningful data visualization.
These findings directly informed the design of Life, shaping its focus on customization, simplicity, and actionable insights. This user-centered approach ensured the app addressed real-world problems while standing out in a competitive market.
Ideation & Concept Development
With a clear understanding of user needs from research, I began brainstorming how to create a health tracker that prioritized flexibility, simplicity, and usability. This phase focused on generating ideas that addressed the identified gaps while aligning with the technical constraints of a small, two-person team.
Key Priorities
Customizable Tracking: Users needed the ability to create and log unique symptoms, moods, and health data categories tailored to their specific needs.
Ease of Use: The app had to balance robust functionality with an intuitive user experience, ensuring quick and seamless data entry.
Actionable Insights: Data needed to be presented in a meaningful way, enabling users to easily share insights with healthcare providers.
Concept Development Process
Sketching and Mapping: I started with rough sketches to explore information hierarchy and workflows, focusing on how users would navigate and interact with key features.
Feature Prioritization: I narrowed the scope to an MVP that included essential functionalities: custom tags, categories, a calendar view, and exportable PDF reports.
User Flow Mapping: Mapped user flows to ensure seamless navigation and minimize friction in high-priority actions like logging data and reviewing health trends.
The ideation process led to a concept for Life that was both innovative and feasible, combining customizable health tracking with a clean, user-friendly interface. This foundation set the stage for iterative prototyping and design refinement.
Wireframes & Prototyping
With the core concept defined, I began translating ideas into tangible designs through wireframing and prototyping. This phase focused on refining user flows, testing functionality, and ensuring the app would deliver a seamless experience while meeting user needs.
Wireframing Process
Low-Fidelity Wireframes: Created basic wireframes to map out the structure and layout of key screens, focusing on navigation, information hierarchy, and primary actions like logging data and reviewing summaries.
Iterative Improvements: Conducted internal reviews and adjusted wireframes based on feedback to optimize the flow between features like the calendar, health logs, and custom tracking.
Balancing Simplicity and Functionality: Ensured the wireframes incorporated all critical features while maintaining an uncluttered and intuitive interface.
Prototyping Process
Interactive Prototypes: Built clickable prototypes to simulate user interactions, enabling early testing of navigation and workflows.
User Feedback: Tested prototypes with a small group of target users to validate ease of use and identify pain points.
Iterative Testing: Refined prototypes based on user feedback, improving navigation flows, button placement, and overall usability.
By the end of this phase, the app’s framework and core interactions were well-defined, providing a strong foundation for visual design and further development. Wireframing and prototyping ensured the app’s functionality was intuitive and aligned with user expectations.
Visual Design
The visual design phase focused on creating an interface that was both aesthetically pleasing and functional, ensuring that Life was intuitive, engaging, and aligned with modern design trends. This process balanced user needs, technical constraints, and the evolving iOS design guidelines.
Design Objectives
Clarity and Usability: Prioritized clean layouts and accessible typography to ensure users could quickly log and review health data without confusion.
Emotionally Resonant Aesthetic: Leveraged a calming color palette and elegant visuals to create a sense of trust and personalization, aligning with the app’s focus on health and wellness.
Alignment with iOS Guidelines: Transitioned from skeuomorphic to flat design to stay consistent with Apple’s design principles during the shift from iOS 6 to iOS 7.
Design Elements
Color Palette: Developed a palette of soft, vibrant colors that balanced visual delight with accessibility, ensuring key actions and categories were easily distinguishable.
Typography: Used modern, thin font weights for a clean, professional feel while maintaining readability across all devices.
Imagery: Incorporated background images and subtle gradients in key areas, such as the countdown screen, to evoke an emotional connection and foster engagement.
Adapting to Constraints
Designed layouts and interactions that leveraged iOS-native components to simplify development and maintain a polished, cohesive look.
Focused on minimalism to reduce cognitive load and ensure new users could navigate the app effortlessly.
The final visual design combined clarity, simplicity, and emotional appeal, making Life visually distinct while enhancing its functionality. This attention to detail played a key role in building user trust and driving engagement.
This first iteration of Life reflects a visually engaging and simplified design, emphasizing key information while enhancing user experience.
Key Feature: The screen prominently displays the number of days until the user's next expected cycle, along with the specific date, presented in an elegant, minimalistic format. This design prioritizes clarity and immediate access to vital information.
Visual Design: The gradient background introduces a soft, calming aesthetic to foster a sense of personalization and wellness, moving away from overly clinical interfaces common in health apps.
Streamlined Navigation: The bottom navigation bar provides intuitive access to essential app features, such as the home screen, calendar view, analytics, notifications, and settings, ensuring ease of use and logical flow.
By presenting key data prominently and removing unnecessary complexity, this design strengthened user engagement while maintaining simplicity.
The second iteration of Life reflects a significant evolution in both visual design and functionality, creating a more engaging and interactive experience for users.
Dynamic Home Screen (Left): The home screen features a countdown to the next expected cycle, enhanced with a visually stunning background image that fosters a sense of calm and personalization. The integration of a photographic background adds emotional resonance, moving beyond static gradients for a more aspirational aesthetic.
Interactive Calendar (Right): The calendar view introduces a high level of interactivity, allowing users to log essential data, such as the first day of their period, symptoms, and mood, directly from this screen. The design incorporates subtle color cues to highlight key dates, offering users a quick visual reference for their cycles.
Streamlined User Flow: The navigation bar remains consistent, providing seamless access to features like home, calendar, analytics, notifications, and settings. This consistency ensures ease of use while integrating the additional functionality of customizable logs.
This iteration combines aesthetic refinement with improved usability, aligning the app more closely with user needs and preferences. By making data entry intuitive and enhancing the visual appeal, Life continues to prioritize user engagement and satisfaction.
The shift from iOS 6 to iOS 7 marked a pivotal evolution for Life, as the design adapted to Apple’s new flat design guidelines and emphasis on clarity and functionality. The comparison between the iOS 6 (right) and iOS 7 (left) iterations highlights the app’s ability to evolve while maintaining a strong focus on usability.
iOS 6 Design (Right)
Features skeuomorphic elements, such as 3D effects and textured details, which align with Apple’s design language at the time.
Includes bold gradients and button-like interactions, providing a sense of depth.
While visually rich, it leans on decorative elements that can sometimes overshadow the core functionality.
iOS 7 Design (Left)
Embraces Apple’s flat design principles with a clean, minimalist aesthetic. Heavy textures and gradients were replaced with subtle, informational design, focusing on content rather than decoration.
Typography is modernized with thinner fonts, enhancing readability and aligning with iOS 7’s visual language.
The calendar view remains consistent in structure but incorporates softer colors and simplified elements, ensuring a seamless user experience while feeling current with the updated OS.
Design Adaptation: Transitioning to iOS 7 required rethinking visual priorities while retaining functionality. By simplifying visual details and emphasizing information clarity, Life aligned with Apple’s modern design ethos without compromising the user experience that millions of users relied on. This iteration showcased the app’s ability to adapt to major design trends while remaining user-focused.
This iteration (far left) introduced several key improvements aimed at streamlining user interaction and maximizing screen real estate while enhancing functionality.
Horizontal Navigation for Health Categories: A horizontally scrolling navigation bar at the top allows users to quickly switch between health categories such as Symptoms, Moods, Weight, Fertility, and more. This design improvement reduces the need for deeper menu navigation, saving users time and effort when logging or reviewing data.
Horizontal Action Buttons: The "Add Period" and "Add Ovulation" buttons were repositioned horizontally, freeing up vertical space on the screen. This layout not only feels more intuitive but also aligns with the horizontal navigation for consistency in interaction patterns.
Daily Summary Section: The saved real estate was utilized to introduce a summary of the day’s logged events at the bottom of the screen. This section allows users to quickly review their entries, such as symptoms and notes, ensuring all key information is visible at a glance.
These changes reflect a deep understanding of user behavior and the importance of balancing functionality with visual clarity. By reducing friction in navigation and introducing a summary view, this iteration made it even easier for users to engage with their data, reinforcing Life’s commitment to user empowerment.
The final design of Life represents the culmination of iterative enhancements and user-centered decisions, balancing functionality, content, and aesthetics to deliver an intuitive and empowering experience.
Focus on Functionality: The design prioritizes key features like the countdown to the next period, an interactive calendar, and an integrated journal for tracking moods, symptoms, weight, and nutrition. These tools empower users to log and review their health data effortlessly, meeting the app’s core mission of personalization and ease of use.
Streamlined UX/UI: The interface embraces a clean, modern aesthetic, using a dark theme with vibrant accent colors to create visual contrast and enhance readability. The horizontal category navigation and summary views allow users to access critical data with minimal effort, ensuring a seamless and intuitive user experience.
Overcoming Constraints: Despite the challenges of a small team and limited resources, the design leverages smart use of existing iOS patterns, careful space management, and efficient navigation to deliver a polished and professional product.
Recognition and Impact: The final iteration solidified Life’s position as the #1 Period Tracker on the App Store, celebrated for its simplicity, functionality, and ability to empower users with meaningful health insights.
The final design not only reflects an evolution in the app’s capabilities but also highlights a deep understanding of user needs, cementing Life as a trusted tool for millions of people worldwide.
Life’s success was tracked through a comprehensive set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that demonstrated the app's ability to engage users, deliver value, and achieve significant market impact. These metrics allowed us to measure growth, user satisfaction, and overall business performance.
Downloads: Over 22 million global downloads, reflecting strong organic adoption and user demand.
Daily Active Users (DAU): Consistently engaged 500,000 users daily, showcasing the app’s relevance in users’ lives.
Monthly Active Users (MAU): Maintained 2 million monthly active users, emphasizing the app’s retention power.
Stickiness (% DAU/MAU): A high stickiness percentage highlighted user loyalty and frequent engagement.
App Store Impressions and Ranking: Achieved top 5 Health App rankings in over 80 countries, with significant visibility across the App Store.
App Store Reviews: A 4.8-star average rating underscored user satisfaction and the app’s ability to meet user needs.
Retention: Strong retention metrics demonstrated Life’s ability to maintain long-term user relationships.
Revenue/Proceeds: Generated $4 million in total sales, with no marketing spend, driven entirely by word-of-mouth and organic growth.
User Support: Minimal support required (2 daily emails on average), reflecting a seamless and intuitive user experience.
These metrics not only highlight the app’s commercial success but also its ability to deliver a valuable, user-centered experience that resonated with millions worldwide. Life’s data-driven approach to improvement ensured ongoing user satisfaction and market leadership.
Life achieved significant milestones in the health and fitness app market, standing out as a user-focused tool with meaningful impact. These achievements reflect the app’s growth, global reach, and ability to meet user needs effectively:
Top 10 Health & Fitness App in 80+ Countries: Consistently ranked among the best, demonstrating its value to users worldwide.
Localized in 18 Languages: Expanded accessibility and relevance for diverse audiences across the globe.
Over 22 Million Downloads: Achieved steady adoption through organic discovery and user recommendations.
$4 Million in Total Sales: A strong indicator of user engagement and willingness to invest in the app.
500K Daily Active Users: Regular engagement highlights the app’s role as an essential part of users’ routines.
2.1 Million Monthly Active Users: Sustained retention emphasizes the app’s long-term value to its audience.
100% Organic Growth: Grew entirely through word-of-mouth and user satisfaction, with no marketing spend.
Minimal Support Needed: Intuitive design and reliable functionality minimized the need for support, even with a large user base.
These successes underscore Life’s ability to address real user needs while maintaining a strong presence in a competitive market. By focusing on functionality and accessibility, the app became a valuable tool for millions.
Life achieved a significant milestone by ranking as the #13 Top Free App on the US App Store, demonstrating its broad appeal and strong user engagement.
Ranked higher than Facebook Messenger, showcasing the app’s ability to capture attention in a highly competitive market.
Just two spots away from Instagram, further emphasizing Life’s relevance and popularity among a global audience.
This achievement reflects the app’s ability to deliver value to users, outperforming established brands in the App Store rankings without any marketing spend. Life’s presence in the Top 15 underscores its success in meeting user needs and maintaining a competitive edge in a crowded space.
By 2018, Life had grown beyond our ability to manage and maintain it effectively as a two-person team. The app’s rapid growth, with millions of active users and global adoption, presented challenges in scaling operations to meet increasing demands.
Recognizing the potential for further growth under a larger team, we accepted an acquisition offer from Bending Spoons, a leading app development company known for their expertise in scaling and evolving mobile applications. The acquisition ensured that Life would continue to thrive under their stewardship, reaching even more users worldwide.
Life was growing faster than our capacity to sustain it.
Bending Spoons offered a fair and reasonable price for the app.
The app was officially sold in 2018, marking the beginning of its next chapter.
This acquisition highlights the success and value Life brought to the market, ensuring its legacy as a user-focused health app with global impact. It also marked a proud milestone in our journey, as we saw the app we created evolve into something even greater.
