UI · UX Strategy · Product Design
Crew Welleness App
Designing a mental health and habit-tracking app that feels like a companion, not a clinical tool.
Role
Solo product designer — end to end. Concept development, research, UX flows, wireframing, and UI design.
Process
Defined the product concept, researched how existing wellness apps handle emotional check-ins and habit formation, designed the core flows and visual system, then tested early screens with a small group of users to see what actually landed.
Outcome
A warm, tactile design system built around a guide character — and a clear lesson in where playful mechanics help versus where they get in the way.
Screens from the core flow — mood check-in, Journeys path, and the Tools library — showing the grainy, character-led UI in context.
Case details
Most mental health apps read as either clinical (a form pretending to be a friend) or gamified in a way that trivializes the thing it's trying to help with. Crew Wellness App was a concept project built to test a different tone: a "gentle companion" that combines mood tracking, guided exercises, and habit-building without feeling like homework.
People don't want a checklist for their feelings — they want a companion for them.
I started by looking at how existing habit and mental-health apps ask users to check in with themselves — most compress a genuinely hard question ("how are you actually doing today?") into a single tap on an emoji. I wanted to slow that moment down without making it heavier, so it became the anchor for the whole visual language: soft, grainy textures, a muted cream-orange-blue palette, and a recurring character — a bearded man in a yellow hard hat — who shows up throughout the product as a visual stand-in for the user's own progress.
From there I designed the core structure: Journeys (multi-day guided programs for specific goals like anxiety or procrastination), a Tools library of short interactive exercises, an interactive mood chart that replaces emoji taps with something closer to drawing your energy or picking a "weather pattern," a Focus Mode for procrastination-prone work sessions, and morning/evening ritual flows.
I also built in an RPG-style progression system — XP, levels, and unlockable outfits for the character — as a way to give users a visible sense of growth.
USER journey MAP
The journey stays warm and calming through onboarding, check-ins, and reflection — the one dip is habit-tracking, where XP and leveling felt gimmicky. It points to a clear principle: gamify the doing, not the feeling.
insight
Character and tone calmed users; gamified feelings felt gimmicky.
Ready for outcomes
What the design revealed
01
A warm, character-led visual system and a slowed-down mood check-in tested as genuinely calming — the "gentle companion" framing worked.
02
Gamification (XP, levels, unlockables) didn't transfer cleanly from productivity features to emotional ones — users wanted the mental-health side to feel sincere, not scored.
03
The takeaway shaped a clearer principle for the concept going forward: gamify the doing (habits, focus sessions), not the feeling — and keep the character as a source of warmth rather than a progress bar.