Year
2019
My Role
Founder, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Strategy, Product Management, App Store Optimization, Analytics, User Support
One built on the success of Life, offering advanced features like customizable categories, timestamped journals, and data visualizations to empower users. Despite high user satisfaction and a 4.8 App Store rating, the app faced challenges in scaling but remains live and praised by its loyal user base. Insights from this project continue to shape my approach to user-centered design.
Challenge
Existing tracking apps were either too rigid or overly complex, making it difficult for users to log and analyze their lives efficiently. While Life offered some customization, it lacked advanced insights and seamless usability.
Users needed a tool that combined quick, easy logging with powerful visualization features like charts and graphs. The challenge was to create an app that balanced simplicity with functionality, empowering users to track and analyze their lives effortlessly. One was designed to solve this.
Solution
One was designed to address the limitations of existing tracking apps by combining advanced functionality with an intuitive, streamlined experience. The app allows users to track every aspect of their lives with custom, color-coded categories tailored to their needs. It emphasizes quick and efficient logging, making it easy for users to enter data multiple times a day without hassle.
To help users make sense of their data, One introduces advanced charts and graphs that visualize trends, patterns, and daily averages. A built-in journal feature adds context, allowing users to combine qualitative and quantitative insights seamlessly. Designed for usability, One ensures users can track and analyze their lives with minimal effort while gaining valuable insights into their habits and well-being.
Approach
To create One, I focused on balancing advanced functionality with effortless usability. Building on insights from Life users and competitive research, I identified key goals: streamline the experience, enhance customization, and add advanced visualization tools.
I mapped workflows to ensure features like category creation, data logging, and visualization were intuitive and quick to use. I tested prototypes with users, refining the Home Screen, charting tools, and journal based on feedback. By leveraging existing design patterns and prioritizing scalability, I created a tool that empowers users to track and analyze their lives with minimal effort.
Outcome
The development of One allowed me to refine and expand on the foundations established with Life, introducing significant improvements in usability, design, and functionality. By focusing on creating a customizable, lightweight tool for frequent interactions, I explored innovative ways to simplify complex workflows and provide users with actionable insights through advanced visualization tools.
Key Achievements
High User Satisfaction: Rated 4.8 stars on the App Store, reflecting strong approval from users.
Positive User Feedback: Received ongoing emails from users praising it as the best period and health tracker available.
Longevity: The app remains live and continues to meet the needs of a dedicated user base years after launch.
The idea for One began with a discovery of a fascinating life-tracking project on Reddit. A user meticulously logged every hour of their life over an entire year, breaking their activities into 20 color-coded categories and assigning a happiness rating (0-100) for each day. Alongside the data, they recorded daily summaries of what happened and noted anything that went wrong, creating a comprehensive, self-reflective view of their year.
This approach inspired the concept for One: an app that would make life tracking accessible and efficient for anyone, without the need for spreadsheets or manual data entry. By turning the complexity of tracking into a seamless experience, One sought to empower users with similar tools to analyze their habits, moods, and activities, bringing clarity to the patterns of their lives.
This screen highlights the original inspiration, showcasing how granular, personalized data tracking can create a deeper understanding of daily life and its impact on happiness and productivity. One was built to streamline and enhance this process for modern users.
I was inspired by a Reddit post from user u/Jade, who documented every hour of their life for an entire year. This meticulous effort included categorizing activities into 20 distinct, color-coded groups, rating daily happiness on a scale from 0 to 100, and summarizing key events and challenges for each day.
u/Jade’s approach to life tracking showcased the power of granular, personalized data to uncover patterns and insights. Their commitment to maintaining a consistent and structured log highlighted the potential for tools that empower users to take control of their habits, moods, and overall well-being.
This project became the foundation for One, a mobile app designed to streamline and enhance life tracking by making it more accessible, customizable, and insightful for modern users.
u/Jade’s year-long life-tracking project not only included detailed hourly logs but also an extensive range of data visualizations. By leveraging her comprehensive dataset, she was able to create graphs that provided meaningful insights into her habits, routines, and emotional well-being.
Key visualizations included:
Happiness Trends: Graphed happiness across the year, as well as by day of the week and month, revealing patterns in emotional highs and lows.
Sleep and Activity Analysis: Tracked average bedtime and wake-up times, alongside hours spent sleeping, exercising, working, and socializing.
Category Breakdown: Visualized hours dedicated to various activities such as studying, chores, and time spent with significant others or friends.
Interaction Insights: Showcased the relationship between happiness and time spent with others, identifying the impact of social interactions on overall well-being.
These visualizations demonstrated the power of structured data in uncovering patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. Inspired by this, One was designed to give users the same ability to track, analyze, and visualize their lives—transforming personal data into actionable insights for self-improvement.
The onboarding screens for One are designed to familiarize users with the app’s features and value proposition while ensuring a smooth and engaging first experience:
Welcome to One
Introduces users to the app with the tagline "One app, for everything!" This screen highlights the comprehensive tracking capabilities, including period, fertility, medication, symptoms, moods, and more.Accurate and Easy to Use
Demonstrates the app’s focus on simplicity and accuracy, emphasizing its ability to track cycles effortlessly while offering reliable predictions for important dates like periods and ovulation.Data Privacy Assurance
Reassures users that their personal health data remains private and secure, emphasizing that One does not sell or share user data, building trust from the outset.Cycle Reminders
Explains the optional notification feature for tracking cycles and receiving helpful reminders, allowing users to stay informed without any hassle.Personalization Options
Allows users to select a wallpaper to personalize their app experience, showcasing a variety of designs that make tracking feel more personal and enjoyable.Subscription and Benefits
Introduces the One+ subscription, detailing the features available with a 7-day free trial. Users can access all tracking categories, detailed analytics, export options, and customization features, presented with a clear call to action to subscribe.
These onboarding screens balance information with engagement, creating a strong first impression while ensuring users understand the app’s value and functionality.
One was designed to be the next evolution in life tracking, offering a simple yet powerful solution for users to monitor and analyze their daily activities. With a focus on quick and efficient interactions, the app supports a broad range of use cases while remaining easy to use for beginners and robust enough for advanced users.
Key Features:
Customizable User Experience: Users can create and color-code their own categories to match their unique tracking needs.
Effortless Tracking: Quickly log activities, moods, and health data with minimal effort.
Data Visualization: Includes charts, graphs, and insights to make sense of patterns and trends over time.
Timestamped Journal: Allows users to document key moments and add context to their data.
One+ Subscription: Unlocks advanced features for enhanced functionality.
This screen highlights One's core experience: the customizable home screen for easy access to categories and an intuitive mood tracker with visualizations that turn raw data into actionable insights. One provides a seamless, user-centered design that empowers individuals to take control of their lives.
The evolution from Life to One is evident in the redesign of the Countdown screen, reflecting improved functionality and a more intuitive user experience.
Life: The Countdown screen in Life featured a horizontal navigation bar for categories and a primary focus on cycle dates and the countdown to the period start. While visually clean, the design limited users' ability to see multiple categories or add further context at a glance.
One: The Countdown screen in One introduces an expandable monthly calendar widget, prominently displaying key dates with enhanced accessibility. The countdown is still present but plays a secondary role to a more dynamic home screen showcasing user-defined categories. This redesign prioritizes flexibility and efficiency, allowing users to log data and track their health with greater ease.
This comparison highlights the shift from a static and linear design to a more user-centered, interactive experience tailored for seamless navigation and customization.
The Mood category underwent a major transformation in One, addressing the limitations of its predecessor in Life and introducing features designed to enhance user flexibility and ease of use.
Life: The Mood category in Life allowed users to add or remove mood tags but offered limited customization and visibility into historical trends. Entries were simple and focused on individual tags, leaving users with fewer ways to personalize their tracking experience.
One: The Mood category in One takes customization to the next level. Users can create fully customizable, color-coded categories, grouping related tags for easier tracking and deeper insights. The design includes a timeline of mood entries, clear levels (e.g., "Great," "Balanced," "Bad"), and the ability to add notes for more context. This update not only streamlines the user experience but also empowers users to see their emotional trends over time.
This evolution reflects a thoughtful approach to user needs, transforming the Mood category into a powerful tool for understanding and improving emotional well-being.
The charts and graphs in One were designed to provide users with meaningful insights into their tracked data through clear and engaging visualizations. This section highlights three key visual formats available within the app:
Pie Charts: Display the distribution of tags within a category, such as mood, offering users a snapshot of how their data is categorized over a specific time period. For example, users can quickly see the ratio of "Good" versus "Bad" days.
Donut & Bar Charts: Provide a deeper analysis, including comparisons of positive versus negative trends, monthly averages, and daily breakdowns. These charts make it easy to identify patterns, such as recurring moods on specific days of the week or months with higher positivity.
Yearly Heatmaps: Visualize daily averages for an entire year, allowing users to identify long-term patterns and correlations with other tracked data, such as cycles or events. Each square represents a day, color-coded to reflect the recorded data, making it simple to detect trends at a glance.
These visualizations empower users to move beyond simply recording data, enabling them to analyze trends and make informed decisions about their health and habits. This focus on actionable insights sets One apart as a tool for both daily use and long-term reflection.
One was a continuation of my work with Life, designed to offer users a powerful tool to track and analyze their lives with greater customization and usability. While One achieved high user ratings of 4.9 stars on the App Store and continues to be loved by its loyal user base, it did not gain the widespread traction needed to sustain its growth.
Despite its challenges in scaling, One showcased significant advancements in functionality, interaction design, and data visualization. It remains live today, with users frequently sharing how it has become their go-to health and period tracking app, often describing it as the best in its category.
Ultimately, the development and release of One reinforced my ability to lead a product end-to-end, from research and ideation to design and launch, while balancing user needs with business constraints. It also informed my decision to transition back into full-time roles, where I could continue leveraging these skills within larger organizational ecosystems.
