Case study, self-initiated
Sola is a minimalist iOS wellness app for people living with everyday anxiety. Built on one belief: support should feel like a sanctuary, never a sales funnel.
01 The problem
The tools meant to calm people down are the ones adding to the noise. That gap between the promise and the experience is what Sola exists to close.
Cognitive overload
Too many options, no obvious starting point, and feeds full of celebrity content. An anxious user opens the app and freezes - the screen itself becomes another decision to manage.
Broken trust
Basic breathing exercises and mood logging sit locked behind a subscription. The user came for a free moment of calm and instead hits a wall - so they leave, and rarely come back.
Pressure tactics
Upsell prompts surface on nearly every tap - countdown timers, guilt-worded buttons. It manufactures urgency, the exact opposite of what the moment calls for.
02 Research
A competitive teardown of three leading wellness apps, cross-referenced with Reddit threads, WHO guidance, and published clinical data. Not just what they look like - where exactly they lose people.
The polished giant. Lifestyle-led, heavy paywall.
The structured course. Friendly, rigid, locked.
The journaling tool. Sharp focus, utilitarian feel.
The number that suprised me
03 The persona
Built from the research, not invented to fit it. Maya is a composite of the people Sola is for - capable young professionals carrying more pressure than support.
Software Developer, 25
Maya writes code for a fast-moving product team. She is good at her job, which is part of the problem. The deadlines keep coming, the standup keeps asking, and the open-plan office never really goes quiet. She gets home wired, not tired. Sleep comes late. She has tried meditation apps before, but they asked her to commit to a 10-day course or buy a subscription before she'd felt anything work. So they sit unopened on her phone.
04 Storyboard
Before designing a single screen, I mapped the real-world arc Sola has to fit inside - six frames, from the spike of anxiety to the quiet that follows.
The spike
A wave of anxiety hits Maya mid-afternoon - chest tight, thoughts racing, no warning.
Reaching out
She reaches for her phone and opens Sola - hoping for relief, not another task.
A breath at her desk
A guided breathing exercise runs in under two minutes - short enough to fit between tasks.
A walk outside
Later, a grounding prompt nudges her outdoors - movement and air, away from the screen.
Back in the open office
The noise returns - colleagues, calls, pings - but she has a tool to step out for a minute.
The day ends lighter
A quick evening check-in closes the loop - she logs how she feels and heads home calmer.
Using SAP AppHaus toolkit.
How might we
How might we help Maya ease her anxiety with quick, accessible practices, without adding more pressure, clutter, or cost to a day that's already full?
05 User flow and architecture
The information architecture, rebuilt around the new screens. Onboarding gets the user to value fast; from there, five tabs hold everything Sola does - no maze, no dead ends.
Entry - onboarding
01
Pick what's closest to you: what's driving the anxiety, what tends to help.
02
Sola reads the answers and lines up the practices that fit you.
03
Asked only now, once there's something worth saving.
04
Land on Home, already tailored to the answers.
Entry - onboarding
Mood check-in, today's focus, quick relief.
Browse practices by category, no noise.
Free writing, voice input, gentle mood tags.
Progress, streaks, settings, calm by default.
06 Design principles
Every screen had to answer to these. When a decision got hard, I came back here.
Principle 1
Breathing, grounding and journaling stay free, forever. Trust is earned by being useful first - not by locking the door and asking for a key.
Principle 2
Sessions run 1-5 minutes. Short enough to slip into any day, complete enough to leave the user genuinely calmer than they opened it.
Principle 3
Reminders read like a friend checking in, not a product fighting churn. No countdowns, no guilt, no dark patterns - anywhere.
07 Key decisions
Research showed logging itself feels like pressure - the harder it is to start, the less people do it. The question was whether to make typing better, or remove typing as the default entirely.
Pros
Cons
Verdict: Chosen as the primary journaling experience. Text provides clarity, privacy and long-term value, a more sustainable foundation for mindful reflection.
Pros
Cons
Verdict: Discarded as primary. Voice stays a valuable secondary feature, but its privacy limits make it less reliable day to day.
Research was blunt: users want help before they want a tour. Most onboarding flows take 60-120 seconds before delivering a single moment of value.
Pros
Cons
Verdict: Chosen: features earn discovery through use, not through a tutorial wall.
Pros
Cons
Verdict: Wrong moment. The first 30 seconds belong to relief, not orientation.
08 Usability testing
Four issues showed up again and again. Here are two of them - before and after the fix.
Issue 1 - orientation
“I'm on the home screen, but I don't know what to do first.”
Test participant, round 1
The fix: a single mood check-in and one “focus today” card became the obvious first action, every other option moved a layer down.
Issue 2 - completion
“Did it just end? I'm not sure if I finished or it cut out.”
Test participant, round 1
The fix: every session now ends on a dedicated completion screen: duration, a gentle “well done”, and a one-tap check-in that closes the loop.
09 The solution
Every insight from the research, every fix from the testing - resolved into a product that does one thing well: gives an anxious person a calmer minute, fast, and asks for nothing in return.
Move 1 - entry
No tutorial, no detours. Sola opens with a single mood check-in, and the answer routes straight to a matched practice.
Move 2 - relief
Breathing and grounding sit one tap from Home. Free, 1-5 minutes long, and always ending on a real completion screen, so the moment closes properly.
Move 3 - trust
Core features stay free. Reminders read like a friend checking in. No countdowns, no guilt-worded buttons. The app never sells at the moment of need.
10 Design system
A small, disciplined kit. Few colours, one typeface, a focused set of components - each tied to a real flow. The page you're reading is built from it too.
Three foundation tones do most of the work. Five soft mood accents appear only inside mood components - never as decoration.
One typeface across the whole product - SF Pro. Native-feeling on every device, legible at every size, quiet enough to never compete with the content.
A single family removes visual noise. Sola never asks the eye to switch register - the calm starts with the letterforms.
Everything sits on an 8-pt spacing grid, sized for iPhone - 393 x 852 pt.
A focused library, built once and used everywhere. Each component maps to a real screen in the flow above.
11 Reflection
Sola is still in motion. This section evolves as I run more tests and ship more screens.
Step 1
A calm layer that reads your Apple Watch heart rate in real time. When it picks up a spike, it nudges you toward a matched breathing or grounding session.
Step 2
A full visual pass for low-light and late-night use. Same warmth, lower contrast, easier on the eyes when sleep is the next step.
Step 3
Taking the design from Figma to a working build. Using AI-assisted code to ship a real, testable version of the app.
The takeaway
Sola proves that a wellness app can earn trust by being useful first: leading with free relief, respecting the user's time, and never selling at the moment of need.
Sola
The screens above run as a real app in the browser. Open it, or tell me what you would change.
