Redesigning a fitness tracking app to boost engagement and user retention.

Role:

Product Designer

Areas:

Healthy nutrition support app

Duration:

Full-cycle design - from discovery to handoff

Project overview:

Athlevo is a mobile app designed to help users build and maintain healthy eating habits through personalized meal planning, progress tracking, and motivation tools. The main goal was to develop a solution that not only tracks nutrition, but keeps users engaged, accountable, and consistent over time, improving retention and long-term results.

Problem to solve:

Most nutrition apps either focus only on tracking calories or are too complex for everyday use. Users often drop off after the first weeks due to:

Low engagement and motivation
Overloaded interfaces and complex onboarding
Lack of personalization and clear progress feedback

Design objectives:

Simplify onboarding and make it motivating
Design personalized meal-tracking experience
Create visual progress dashboards to increase retention
Improve habit building through reminders and micro-interactions
Ensure intuitive navigation across key flows (onboarding, meal tracking, progress tracking)

My responsibilities:

Conducted competitor analysis and user interviews to identify user habits and struggles
Designed user flows, wireframes, onboarding, and personalized dashboards
Built UI library, components, and established design patterns in Figma
Designed high-fidelity UI and prototypes for demo and usability testing
Worked closely with product manager and developers to implement MVP

Design process:

1. Research:

Competitive analysis (MyFitnessPal, Lifesum, Yazio)
User pain points: too complex, no personalization, low long-term motivation
Insights: users don’t just want tracking - they need motivation and reminders

2. Ideation & Flows:

Created main flows: onboarding, meal tracking, dashboard
Defined empty states, error states, micro-interactions

3. Prototyping:

Mid- and high-fidelity prototypes in Figma
Improvements: moved daily log shortcut to bottom tab, simplified onboarding from 6 to 4 steps

4. UI & Design System:

Created scalable component library (colors, typography, icons, buttons, cards)
Reusable templates for dashboard, logging screens, and tracking views

Key features & UX decisions:

Smart Onboarding - Guided setup with questions about goals, diet type, lifestyle - enabled personalized plan instantly

Habit-building Dashboard - Visual tracking progress, streaks, achievements to motivate users

Quick Meal Logging - Simple search, barcode scanning, or photo upload for food recognition

Gamified Progress & Motivation - Micro-rewards, daily streaks, supportive tips

Reminder & Notification Strategy - Personalized reminders (not push-spam), built on behavior insights

Results & Value:

Simplified onboarding and workout planning improved clarity of first-time experience and helped users understand product value faster.
Created a structured design system that reduced UI inconsistencies and sped up future design iterations.
Clear navigation, visual hierarchy, and progress tracking boosted motivation and overall user engagement (based on internal feedback and demo reviews).
Documented component behavior and flows improved team collaboration and reduced developer handoff friction.