Habit Tracker
Built for the miss day, not just the win day.
The Brief
Every habit app is designed for the person who never misses. This one isn't.
Most habit apps punish you for breaking your streak. They make the miss feel like failure — and that feeling is exactly what makes people quit. I wanted to design something that treated consistency as a spectrum, not a binary.
The brief: a minimal iOS habit tracker capped at 3 habits, no gamification, with an ember metaphor at the core. Keep the flame alive. Don't let it go out. But if it dims — it can come back.
Design Thinking
The constraint was the design. Three habits. No more.
The 3-habit cap wasn't a technical limitation. It was a design principle grounded in behaviour science. Research consistently shows that people attempting more than 3 new habits simultaneously succeed with none. The app's job was to enforce that discipline before the user had to.
Every UX decision ran through one question: does this help someone maintain a habit through a hard week, or does it just look good in a Dribbble shot?
Process
34 flows. 27+ screens. Every state accounted for.
Persona: Arjun Mehta
27, software developer, Bangalore. Starts habits with high motivation, abandons when the streak breaks. Needs forgiveness built into the system.
User Journey Mapping
Mapped the complete emotional arc: the motivated start → the first miss → the guilt → the return. Designed for every stage.
Information Architecture
3-tab structure: Today, Streaks, Someday. 34 user flows covering all edge cases including empty states, onboarding, and milestone events.
Visual Design System
Ember metaphor: orange #FF6B35 as primary, dark charcoal background. Clash Display + Inter. 8pt grid. Dark + light mode both fully designed.
State Design
15 onboarding states, 7 Today Tab states, Someday queue, milestone celebrations. Applied Fitts's Law, Hick's Law, and Gestalt principles throughout.
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Screens designed
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User flows mapped
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Onboarding state variations
Selected Screens
