Just One

Just One is a wellness app that helps users build healthier routines by starting each day with one simple, motivating task.

Role

UI UX Designer

TimeLine

December 2024 – January 2025

Tools

Figma

Project Type

Bootcamp project, UX Academy

The Problem

Users often struggle to form habits because:

🔁 Traditional apps feel rigid and overwhelming
❌ Overloaded to-do lists lead to burnout or avoidance
⏰ Without a sense of early accomplishment, motivation fades
🧠 Long-term behavior change feels daunting without momentum

The Solution

Just One simplifies habit-building by:

🎯 Giving users one small task each morning (e.g. drink water, step outside)
✨ Making the habit feel light, doable, and rewarding
🔁 Reinforcing momentum through positive feedback and streaks
🌞 Helping users start the day with purpose and energy

The Research

For the Just One project, I conducted multiple forms of user research to inform the product direction and experience design. This included a competitive analysis of similar habit and alarm-based apps to understand feature gaps and user expectations. I also conducted user interviews with real participants to explore how people currently build habits, what motivates them, and where they typically fall off. From these findings, I developed a clear user persona that helped guide all design decisions. Finally, I synthesized the research through an affinity map, grouping user quotes, pain points, and behavioral patterns to uncover actionable insights. These combined methods ensured that Just One was grounded in user needs, not assumptions.

User Interviews

To understand how people build and maintain daily habits, I conducted interviews with 10 participants. Key findings:

70% of users feel overwhelmed by traditional habit-tracking apps

80% said they struggle most with starting their day on the right foot

Many users mentioned they lose motivation when tasks feel too structured or demanding

Competitive Analysis

I analyzed apps like Alarmy, Routinery, and Fabulous to identify gaps. Findings:

Most apps rely on rigid routines or overwhelming task lists

Few apps offer spontaneous, lightweight tasks that feel achievable first thing in the morning

Motivation features like celebrations, feedback, or positive reinforcement are often missing or paywalled

Below is a breakdown of each competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, paired with key screens that highlight their core functionality.

Alarmy

Strengths

Simple habit tracking with yes/no logging.

Offers clean graphs and streak-based tracking.

Highly customizable categories and tags.

Weaknesses

Minimal design with little visual engagement.

No motivational prompts or reinforcement.

Lacks social or community interaction features.

Routinery

Strengths

Uses behavioral science and habit-stacking principles.

Offers clean graphs and streak-based tracking.

Offers progress tracking with charts and analytics.

Weaknesses

Can feel rigid and overly structured.

No motivational prompts or reinforcement.

Limited flexibility for spontaneous or shifting schedules.

Fabulous

Strengths

Visually appealing interface with strong UX and animations.

Built around structured habit-forming journeys.

Uses gamification and progress rewards to drive engagement.

Weaknesses

Many core features locked behind a paywall.

Structured journeys may lack personalization.

Content may become repetitive over time.

User Personas

Michael the Achiever

Age: 35
Occupation: Software Developer
Location: Seattle, Wa
Family: Married with 2 kids

To make sense of the interview data, I created an affinity map — a method for synthesizing user quotes by grouping related thoughts, pain points, and behaviors. This allowed me to organize raw feedback into clear, actionable patterns.

Affinity Map

Insights

After analyzing competitors and gathering insights from interviews, I created two user personas to represent the primary mindsets and behaviors uncovered during research.

Goals:

Create a morning routine that balances productivity with family time

Improve physical fitness through consistent habits

Advance personal and professional growth

Pain Points:

Struggles with time management during busy mornings

Feels frustrated by overwhelming or rigid task lists

Difficulty integrating personal goals into daily routine

Olivia the Optimizer

Age: 29
Occupation: Marketing Specialist
Location: Austin, TX
Family: Single, lives with her cat

Goals:

Establish a consistent, energizing morning routine

Incorporate mindfulness and personal growth into daily habits

Start each day with focus and a sense of accomplishment

Pain Points:

Struggles with waking up and staying motivated

Feels overwhelmed by rigid or multi-step routines

Finds it difficult to stick to long-term morning habits

I organized the observations into clusters like benefits, common findings, pain points, and possible solutions. This helped highlight what mattered most to users and revealed key opportunities for the product.

Just One is grounded in key research insights, including:

Users want a lightweight and flexible routine that doesn’t feel overwhelming
Positive reinforcement and a sense of progress are key motivators
Switching between multiple apps (alarms, journals, lists) creates friction
A consistent morning routine helps users feel in control and focused

After completing the affinity map, I moved beyond research and into the next phase — Prioritization & Roadmapping — where I translated insights into actionable design decisions.

Prioritization & Roadmapping

After identifying key insights, I organized potential features and interactions to ensure the experience stayed simple, intentional, and user-driven. This phase helped me clarify what should be prioritized early and what could be introduced later — laying the foundation for a focused and intuitive flow.

I grouped the features into four categories to guide decision-making: must-haves, nice-to-haves, delightful extras, and future ideas.

Must have

These are foundational features necessary for the MVP:

Account creation
Morning task alarm
Task feedback system
Custom alarm settings
Task history & progress tracking
Task preview

Updating Profile Info

Nice to have

Features that enhance the experience but aren’t required to launch:

Morning routine tips
Daily affirmations
Customizable themes

Enabling/Disabling Motivational Affirmations

Delightful

Features that delight and engage users but are not critical:

Challenge alarms
Social sharing
Gamification and rewards

After finalizing the feature set, I mapped out key task flows to visualize how users would interact with each core function. This helped ensure each experience was intuitive, focused, and aligned with the app’s purpose.

Task Flows

Viewing task History

To support the prioritized features, I mapped out task flows for three core user actions: viewing task history, updating profile information, and enabling/disabling motivational affirmations. Each flow was designed to reduce friction, limit cognitive load, and align with how users naturally move through the app. These flows helped ensure that even secondary features remained intuitive and purposeful.

Future Ideas

Future enhancements to explore after launch:

Smart alarm integration
AI task recommendations
Virtual coach

With priorities and flows locked in, I moved into branding and wireframes — shaping the look and feel to match the app’s calm, motivational purpose.

Branding and wireframes

With the product direction defined, I turned my focus to shaping how Just One should look and feel. I started by exploring logo concepts that embodied the brand’s essence — calm, optimistic, and growth-minded. Once the visual identity felt right, I sketched lo-fi wireframes to quickly map out structure and functionality. These early layouts gave me clarity without distractions. From there, I built a UI kit to define the visual language — typography, color, and components — and brought it all to life through high-fidelity wireframes and an interactive prototype.

Before designing the logos, I started by reflecting on the name Just One — a phrase that captures the idea of taking one small, intentional step each day. I wanted the branding to visually express this mindset: something light, approachable, and motivating, grounded in simplicity and forward momentum.

Logos

I selected the flower design because it struck the right balance of simplicity, optimism, and motion. Its clean, modern shape mirrors the app’s lightweight, motivational tone — helping users feel calm and ready to grow, one day at a time.

With the brand direction in place, I sketched out key screens to explore layout and user flow. These lo-fi wireframes helped me quickly test structure and interaction without focusing on visuals—laying the groundwork for the high-fidelity design phase.

Lofi Sketches

Once the structure felt right on paper, I shifted to shaping the visual language that would define the experience.

Before jumping into high-fidelity design, I built a UI kit to define the visual language of Just One. I focused on colors, typography, and reusable components that felt calm, clean, and encouraging — capturing the brand’s balance of simplicity and motivation while ensuring visual consistency across every screen.

Hifi Wireframes

Ui Kit

With the UI kit in place, I translated my ideas into high-fidelity wireframes. This step brought structure and style together, allowing me to refine layout, interaction, and flow — ensuring each screen felt purposeful and aligned with the uplifting Just One experience.

View Prototype

These high-fidelity wireframes brought everything together — clean design, motivating visuals, and thoughtful interaction. Every element was built to reinforce the core idea of growth through simple, consistent action. Just One now felt like a product with purpose, not just polish.

With the core experience fully designed, it was time to test how it actually worked for users. Moving into iterations and usability testing, I focused on refining the flow, catching friction points, and making sure Just One felt as intuitive and uplifting in practice as it did on paper.

Iterations and Testing:

Once the high-fidelity designs were complete, I moved into usability testing by interviewing and observing real users as they interacted with the prototype. The goal was to uncover friction points, see what felt intuitive, and hear honest reactions to the flow and features. I combined task-based testing with quick interviews to get both behavioral insight and verbal feedback. These sessions revealed what was working and what still needed refinement — helping me prioritize meaningful improvements backed by real usage.

To clearly capture insights from these sessions, I created a scorecard to track task success, timing, and direct user comments.

Usability Test Scorecard

From this testing, it became clear that while users found the core flow intuitive, there were meaningful opportunities to improve personalization and motivation. I focused my iterations around three areas that directly addressed user feedback: adding more control with alarm customization, enabling recurring alarm scheduling to support habit consistency, and improving progress tracking visuals to keep users engaged and aware of their growth. These changes were designed to make the experience feel more supportive, flexible, and aligned with real user needs.

Iterations

1. Alarm Customization

Users found the original ringtones uninspiring, which reduced engagement with the alarm feature. To improve this, I introduced motivational ringtones with uplifting names to align with the app's mission of fostering positivity and growth.

2. Recurring alarm scheduling

Initially, users struggled to efficiently schedule alarms for multiple recurring days. I redesigned this feature to provide a more intuitive interface, allowing users to select multiple days at once and save time.

3. Progress tracking updates

The Task timer lacked a clear way to track task progress, leaving users uncertain about their completion. I added a dynamic progress bar to provide real-time feedback and enhance user motivation.

Conclusion

Designing Just One was more than building a habit app — it was about crafting a supportive, motivating experience that encourages users to grow with intention. Every decision, from branding and flows to feedback-driven iterations, was guided by a desire to simplify action and spark momentum. Through research, testing, and thoughtful refinement, Just One evolved into a product that empowers users to improve their lives one step at a time — and that’s exactly the kind of impact I aim to create with every project.

Next steps

Implement more advanced personalization like adaptive task suggestions based on user behavior
Introduce social features to build community and increase motivation
Conduct longitudinal testing to measure habit-building effectiveness over time
Continue refining onboarding based on tester feedback for a smoother first-time experience

Key Takeaways

Small actions, when designed thoughtfully, can drive meaningful behavior change
Clear flows and motivational design reduce friction and boost engagement
Direct user feedback is invaluable — it revealed insights that weren't obvious through assumption
Building flexible features (like recurring alarms) allows users to adapt the experience to their lives