Fit After Baby
Postpartum Wellness App

The Challenge

The postpartum period is one of the most physically and emotionally demanding transitions a person can experience. New mothers are simultaneously recovering from childbirth, adapting to round-the-clock infant care, and trying to re-establish healthy routines — often with little sleep and limited support.

I was brought on to design the user experience for a health tracking app that needed to balance two competing demands: providing rich, actionable health data for users and their coaches, while keeping the interface simple enough that a sleep-deprived new parent could use it one-handed during a feeding session.

Project Goals

1. Reduce Friction in Daily Logging Make it fast and effortless to track calories, exercise, weight, stress, and hunger so that consistent use doesn't feel like a burden.
2. Surface Meaningful Progress Design a progress dashboard that reveals patterns and trends across multiple time horizons, helping users and their coaches identify what's working.
3. Support a Coach-Guided Model Integrate personalized weekly goals, educational content, and coach check-ins so the app feels like a partner, not just a data logger.
4. Design for Real-World Context Account for the physical reality of postpartum life: one-handed use, interrupted sessions, varying energy levels, and the need for encouragement over pressure.
5. Responsive Cross-Device Experience Create layouts that work naturally on both iPhone and iPad, using additional screen space on tablet to present richer data views.

Research & Discovery

I began by reviewing existing health and fitness tracking apps to understand conventions users were already familiar with, and where those conventions fell short for this specific audience. Most mainstream fitness apps assume a user who is motivated, goal-driven, and has a predictable daily routine — assumptions that break down during the postpartum period.

Through conversations with the product team and subject matter experts in postpartum health, I identified several key insights that shaped the design direction:

Design Solutions

Adaptive Progress Dashboard

The heart of the app is the Progress screen — a calorie and nutrition tracking dashboard that adapts its data density based on the selected time range. I designed four distinct views (Day, Week, Month, and All) that share a consistent layout structure but adjust the level of detail to match the scope of data being shown.

Each view presents a bar chart of daily calorie intake with the user's goal rendered as a horizontal reference line, making it imcase-studiestely clear which days fell above or below target. To the right of the chart (on iPad) or below it (on iPhone), a summary panel shows the active goal, average daily calories, and the number of days the goal was met.

Below the main calorie view, secondary charts for protein, saturated fat, and fiber provide deeper nutritional context. Each uses the same bar-and-reference-line pattern for visual consistency, with a color system — purple for protein, blue for saturated fat, green for fiber — that creates instant visual differentiation.

Time-Range Navigation

I designed the Day/Week/Month/All toggle as a segmented control anchored directly below the chart, keeping the time-range context tightly coupled with the data it controls. Arrow navigation on either side of the date header lets users step forward and backward through time periods without changing the selected granularity — so browsing through weeks or months feels fluid rather than requiring mode switches.

This pattern was particularly important because coaches needed to review a participant's data at different scales during check-ins: the daily view to understand specific meals, the weekly view to spot behavioral patterns, and the all-time view to assess overall trajectory.

Multi-Dimensional Health Trackers

Beyond calorie tracking, the app supports five additional tracking dimensions: weight, exercise, food, stress, and hunger. I consolidated access to all trackers in the "More" screen, using a horizontally scrollable icon row that gives each tracker a distinct visual identity.

Each tracker opens a purpose-built logging experience. The exercise tracker, for example, presents a minimal form with just four fields — date, exercise type, duration, and distance — with large, easy-to-read typography and two equally weighted action buttons at the bottom. A new mother logging a 30-minute walk can do so in under ten seconds.

Weekly Coaching & Goal-Setting

The "For You" section delivers stage-appropriate coaching content tied to the user's week in the program. Each piece opens with an empathetic, relatable hook — acknowledging the reality of postpartum fatigue before offering practical, achievable advice.

The weekly goal is presented with large, prominent typography so users can internalize the number at a glance. Below the goal, a brief note about earning rewards ties into the app's broader engagement system without making gamification feel forced.

Weigh-In Experience

The weigh-in flow follows a similar philosophy: a supportive, non-judgmental introduction that normalizes the process, followed by a single call-to-action to log the week's weight. The tone is warm and practical — acknowledging that not everyone has a scale at home and suggesting alternatives.

Key Design Decisions

Navigation Architecture

The app uses a five-tab navigation structure: Home, Progress, Rewards, For You, and More. This architecture separates the daily experience, data review, motivation, coaching content, and account management into distinct mental models — preventing any single screen from trying to do too much.

I chose a bottom tab bar over hamburger navigation because the target audience needs imcase-studieste, one-tap access to core features. A hidden menu would have added friction to every session, and for an app that depends on daily engagement, even a single extra tap can erode usage over time.

Key Learnings

Design for the worst moment of the user's day. A postpartum wellness app will be used during night feedings, in the fog of sleep deprivation, and during moments of frustration. Every interaction needed to be achievable under those conditions — large touch targets, minimal required input, and forgiving navigation.

Data density should scale with screen size and intent. The iPad layout could afford side-by-side chart and summary panels because tablet usage tends to be more intentional. The iPhone layout stacked the same information vertically because phone usage is more fragmented and often one-handed.

Encouragement is a design pattern, not just copy. The way data is framed — averages over totals, days achieved over days missed, progress over perfection — communicates emotional tone as powerfully as any written message.

Consistency across views builds learnability. By maintaining the same layout structure across all four time-range views, users only need to learn the dashboard once. The data changes; the mental model stays the same.

Reflection

Fit After Baby represents a design challenge that goes beyond interface aesthetics: it's about understanding that health technology for new mothers needs to meet a fundamentally different standard of empathy, simplicity, and encouragement than mainstream fitness apps provide. By grounding the design in the real constraints of postpartum life, I created a tracking experience that feels like a helpful companion rather than another obligation.