Health & Wellness Tracker.
Habitual is a health and lifestyle app helping users create long-lasting change in their physical, mental, and nutritional habits — with a current focus on patients diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes. The existing app had the product's potential buried under an outdated visual identity, fragmented user flows, and a feature set too narrow to attract investors or scale. This project rebuilt the brand and app experience to match where the product needed to go.
Client
Year
2021
Industry
Health / Wellness
Role
Product Designer
Challenge
The old app had three compounding issues. Visually, it relied on a dated colour scheme that failed to communicate the warmth and credibility a health product needs — inconsistent across screens, with no cohesive design language tying the experience together. Structurally, the product was built exclusively around Type 2 Diabetes patients, making the addressable market too narrow for the company's growth ambitions and investor conversations. And from a product standpoint, the existing user flows — onboarding, browsing, purchasing — had friction points that made common tasks harder than they needed to be, slowing down the core actions the business depended on.
approach
Mapped all existing user flows before touching a single screen — understanding what worked, what created friction, and where users dropped off
Identified the three primary flows driving the product's value (onboarding, eCommerce purchase, and recipe/blog-driven conversion) and reverse-engineered the redesign around them
Developed a new visual language rooted in the brand's existing nature-inspired identity — evolved, not discarded — to maintain continuity for existing users while signalling a more mature, scalable product
Restructured the information architecture so the app tells a coherent story across every screen: Home → Discovery → Purchase → Care
Piloted the product pivot from a single-condition app to a broader health and lifestyle platform, expanding the addressable market without losing the existing user base
key decisions
Evolve the brand, don't erase it. The existing identity had roots worth keeping — Forest Green, Sunrise Yellow, Sky Blue, drawn from the colours of food and nature. Rather than starting from scratch, the redesign refined and systematised this palette, adding tints, shades, and contrast-tested combinations that could handle every use case across the product. The result feels recognisably Habitual, but more polished and more intentional.
One toggle, two worlds. The product pivot meant housing both new and existing features within the same app without confusing current users. The solution was a persistent toggle on the Home screen — "For You" for extended content like blogs and recipes, "Programs" for the existing Meal Plans and Medication Plans. Existing users always know where to find what they came for; new users discover the extended feature set naturally.
Commerce that doesn't interrupt. Introducing an eCommerce store into a health app risked making the product feel transactional and pushy. The design kept commerce subordinate to content — "Buy Individual Item" cards within recipe and blog pages carried only a quiet secondary CTA so as not to break the user's reading flow. "Buy as a Bundle" cards, where purchase intent was already established, carried the full CTA set. The shop earns attention; it doesn't demand it.
Micro-interactions to connect flows. The Cart and Shop are two screens serving one workflow. To make that relationship legible without instruction, a micro-animation plays when a user adds an item — the product visually travels from the screen into the Orders icon in the nav bar, where a green indicator dot appears and persists until the cart is resolved. Users understand the system state without reading anything.
deliverables
Brand identity system (colour, typography, gradient language)
Full app redesign (iOS)
Component library and design system
Wireframes and high-fidelity screens across all primary flows
Alignment grid and spacing system · Typography system (AA accessibility tested)
Prototype suite covering onboarding, eCommerce, and blog-to-purchase flows
Design handoff assets and developer spec sheet
A quick video walkthrough of the three key customer interactions
impact
Took Habitual from a bootstrapped single-condition app to a product ready for investor conversations — the redesign was a direct input to securing new funding
Expanded the product's addressable market from Type 2 Diabetes patients to a broader health and lifestyle audience without alienating the existing user base
Streamlined all three primary user flows — onboarding, purchase, and content discovery — reducing friction and making common goals faster to reach
Delivered a comprehensive design system and style guide that gave the team a consistent visual language to build from, across both design and development
reflections
The biggest open question is whether the eCommerce pivot will hold up under real usage data. Introducing a shop into a health app carries inherent tension — the risk that users perceive it as a monetisation layer rather than a genuine extension of value. I'd track content-to-purchase conversion rates closely post-launch, particularly on the recipe and blog flows where the intent signal is softer. If drop-off is high at the CTA step, the next iteration should focus on strengthening the contextual connection between the content and the product being recommended — the design can accommodate that without a structural rethink.
More work
2020 - 2026
More of my work across SaaS, AI, and startups.
