Phlo

Young adults and women (such as myself) need to a smart, simple way of tracking our menstrual cycles. We need to be able to have a personalized log of our cycles and have a quick view to know when they can expect their next flow.

Young adults and women who want to track and recognize patterns within their menstrual cycles.

As a product designer, I've always had an urge to create an app to improve my period tracking app. Testing and experiencing the available period tracking apps on the market, I understood how beneficial an efficient user experience and interface can be to women who simply need to track their cycles.

As someone who falls into the targeted audience and user base, it was easy for me to understand  women's current pains with the on the market period tracking apps.

There are a good handful of apps our there on the App Store and the Google Play store, but all with outdated branding and confusing interactions.
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The existing user base rate their tracking app highly; mostly for their algorithms and features and not for their interactions and experiences. This is an opportunity to explore.

I curated a moodboard that visually represented the kind of aesthetic I was going for: minimal, classic, and  a focused interaction state. I find a lot of inspiration through typography and color so I made it a purposeful intention to highlight these two elements in way that they played a major part in interaction and brand.

To take this tracking app to the next level, I knew the on-boarding experience had to be personal, conversational, and informed the user the value of using Phlo.
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When sketching this out, I always seem to find myself torn between drawing and writing out my first idea of the user flow. But then another idea always spills over and I either add it to my sketch or move on to a new sheet of paper.

I understood the importance of a solid conversational interaction in a customer’s trust in products and the next challenge was how to use visual design to support the experience.

Using my moodboard as an experience and design direction reference, I paired a highly attractive serif with a bright red hue to reference classic editorial design and highlight interactions and utilized the whitespace to draw focus to these interactions.

The onboarding experiencing didn’t changed much from comps to final design besides adding a question. The shift from the home screen in the process came from seperating out the log for more a thinking like the customer coming to the page for the first time. Why do women come to this app? What will women want to do when they first open this app?
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More user testing is needed to answer these questions, I cannot and should not base my designs on my own assumptions.

I believe in narrowing products down to their most viable form; this allows for a more focused and clear direction of the product. By limited Phlo’s features to tracking, logging, and general profile settings, this allows myself as a product designer to test it on the market to see what women are saying about it. I have some ideas in mind on feature improvements, but all would be worthless if I did not have customer feedback to validate.

Go big or go home does not apply to products but to the product design ideation.
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Women’s health is a highly marketable sector, but the real value is improving women’s health, not profiting from it.