Pulse — Health Tracking App
End-to-end UX design for a personalised health and wellbeing app — from zero to App Store.
2024
Overview
Pulse is a health-tracking app that integrates data from Apple Health, wearables, and manual entry to surface personalised, actionable insights. The startup had validated their algorithm with a beta cohort — our job was to design the experience that would take them to public launch.
Research
We ran a four-week discovery sprint: diary studies with 12 participants, interviews with health coaches, and a teardown of 20 competing apps. The finding that shaped the entire design direction:
Users didn't lack data. They lacked context. Every health app showed the same numbers — Pulse needed to show what those numbers meant for you, today.
Information Architecture
Starting from scratch, we mapped 47 user jobs-to-be-done and collapsed them into four primary navigation pillars:
- Today — daily snapshot, contextualised by your week and goals
- Trends — 30/90/365-day views with natural-language summaries
- Goals — milestone tracking, streaks, and adaptive targets
- Insights — weekly digest, flagged anomalies, coach recommendations
Visual Design
Health apps often feel clinical or aggressively motivational. We aimed for calm clarity — a design that felt like a knowledgeable friend rather than a fitness drill-sergeant.
The colour system uses biometric feedback loops as a design metaphor: a gradient that shifts from cool blue (resting, calm) through amber (active) to warm rose (peak effort), appearing contextually throughout the interface.
Motion Design
Every data transition in Pulse is animated — not decoratively, but to reinforce causality. When your sleep score drops, the trend line animates downward with a deceleration that mirrors the feeling of fatigue. Numbers count up, never just appear.
Usability Testing
Five rounds of moderated testing across development. Key iterations:
- Simplified onboarding from 11 screens to 6 after round 1
- Replaced tab bar with gesture-based navigation after round 2
- Added "explain this" tooltip system after users felt confused by composite scores
Outcome
- 4.8 App Store rating at launch (2,400+ ratings in first 90 days)
- D7 retention of 61% (industry benchmark for health apps: ~35%)
- Featured by Apple in "Apps We Love" two weeks post-launch