ux design / start up
role
UX/UI Design
Research
Branding
PRODUCT
End-to-End
Mobile app
tools
Figma, FigJam, Google Workspace, Otter AI
when
August - November 2024
(4 months)
Problem
Hormonal health apps offer fragmented, ineffective approaches that expect users to become their own health analysts instead of providing meaningful, actionable guidance.
Solution
A nutrition-first hormonal health app that transforms passive cycle tracking into proactive wellness management through personalized meal planning.
Key Innovation: Nutrition as the primary engagement driverβactionable meal recommendations that directly address hormonal health needs.
Participants:
I interviewed 6 health-conscious women (ages 20-30s) with diverse lifestyles βcollege students, nurses, and full-time momsβall experienced or abandoned cycle tracking apps. The diversity was purposeful because women do not live a one-size fits all lifestyle, using these insights can diversity the possible solution.
Research Goals:
- Understand abandonment reasons
- Identify real support needs
- Define βwellnessβ in their own terms
Women abandon apps because tracking data doesn't translate to actionable health improvements. Current apps focus on prediction, not prevention.
Users resort to Google searches for answers, leading to stress rather than empowerment. They need consolidated, trustworthy guidance.
Every participant connected healthy eating to cycle wellness, but no existing app addresses this despite 84% wanting personalized nutrition guidance.
User interviews revealed a consistent pattern: women's nutrition habits shift throughout their cycle and directly impact well-being.
Next step: Competitive analysis to evaluate how existing apps address nutrition-hormone connections and validate research supporting this approach.
Where's the gap in the FemTech industry?
Click the graph to see the full analysis
Proactive vs. Reactive
Prevent issues through nutrition rather than just track symptoms
Actionable Insights:
Every data point connects to specific health actions
Sustainable Integration:
Solutions fit chaotic lifestyles, not idealized routines
The women who inspired the solution
Emma's interaction with Lune
Creating the MVP
Based on my initial research and user personas, I created a feature overview to prioritize essential features. Health is layered and there were various features I desired to implement to emphasize the potential credibility, inclusivity, and helpfulness of the app.
The challenge for this project was that it was under time constraints and I wanted to keep the scope manageable. I redirected my focus to balance desirability for the user and feasibility for the engineers.
I focused my design on 2 essential flows the app needs to run, and one supporting element of the app:
Blueprinting User Navigation
Using a card sort with 4 women participants, I gained insight into their mental framework around terms and where they would find specific information.
Here, I crafted a simple sitemap for the app allows users to understand how to navigate this app quickly and easily without much thought, providing them the time to focus on the content itself.
NOTE: as you can see, I planned on adding a telehealth feature, but made the decision to cut the feature from the MVP due to time constraints
The Experience of Lune
Combining both womenβs health and nutrition, the branding aims to mix both harmoniously. The branding draws inspiration from the moon's cyclical nature, symbolizing the dynamic phases of a woman's hormonal cycle, mixed with femininity and fresh greens.
The key words driving the design of the product are:
feminine / inviting / modern / fresh
Usability Testing Feedback
Improve Clarity and Navigation
Guide the user more effectively by making labeling clear and adding visual cues for the next step
Enhance User Efficiency
Streamline user interaction by adding multiple routes to complete tasks faster
Homepage
Giving users a more direct path to accomplish logging their period & improving label clarity
Hub
Improving the content navigation to simplify the browsing experience
Period Tracking
Adding visual cues to streamline the user interaction with logging their symptoms
π¬ Ashley, Woman Participant
Real Quote from the Usability testing
Final Thoughts
Challenging My Own Bias
My own hormonal health struggles fueled this concept, but user research quickly challenged my assumptions. I learned to hold ideas lightly and let data redirect the solutionβeven when it contradicted my instincts.
The Nutrition Bridge
The breakthrough came from recognizing a pattern: women had data but no framework to act on it. Nutrition emerged as the connector between passive tracking and proactive wellness because participants named food as the variable they could actually control. The best solutions amplify existing behaviors, not invent new ones.
Shipping vs. Perfecting
I spent too much time polishing flows when rough prototypes would have surfaced friction faster. Frequent gut checks from other designers would have caught usability issues earlier. I should have also balanced qualitative insights with quantitative validation through unmoderated testing to scale findings on task success rates. Perfectionism extended the timelineβsenior thinking means knowing when "good enough" ships faster than "pixel-perfect."
Takeaway
The gap in FemTech isn't more data; it's translating data into confidence. Impactful design happens when you let research reshape your vision.