Case study · Uniti · Wellness app
Quiet wellness for senior students.
Lead UX/UI Designer on Uniti — a mobile wellness platform built for senior students navigating academic pressure, transition, and social fragmentation. A research-led brief carried end-to-end through interviews, empathy mapping, journey flows, and two phases of high-fidelity prototypes.
- Role
- Lead UX / UI Designer
- Project type
- Research-led brief
- Audience
- Senior students
- Status
- Concept · prototype
The brief
A wellness platform that earns its place.
The brief: design a wellness platform for senior students — but treat the audience as adults, not subjects of intervention. The category is crowded with apps that guilt users into engagement; the opportunity sat in building something they’d actually want to come back to.
Aims & objectives
Three aims, anchored to a real user.
The aims weren’t set in a vacuum — each was tested against findings from interviews, surveys, and existing app behaviour before committing to scope.
- 01
Build a wellness platform tailored to the realities of senior-year student life — academic pressure, transition anxiety, social fragmentation.
- 02
Encourage daily, low-friction engagement instead of yet another habit tracker to feel guilty about.
- 03
Make peer connection feel safe — not performative, not algorithmic.
Research & competitor analysis
The gap between intent and reality.
User interviews and surveys mapped the senior-student reality — what stress actually looks like at this stage, which existing tools they tried, where each one fell short. A parallel competitor analysis benchmarked mainstream wellness platforms across feature, tone, and trust dimensions.
The gap was tonal as much as functional: incumbent apps felt either too gamified (streaks, badges, performance theatre) or too generic (one-size-fits-all wellness content). Neither earned daily, voluntary engagement.
Process
Four moves, end to end.
- 01
Listen first
User interviews and surveys with senior students — what they actually do when they're stressed, what they avoid, where existing wellness apps fail them. Two persona archetypes emerged from the data.
- 02
Map the gaps
Competitor analysis across mainstream wellness platforms surfaced consistent gaps: too generic, too gamified, too performative. The opportunity sat in the quieter end of the spectrum.
- 03
Empathise, then synthesise
Empathy maps and user-journey flows turned the qualitative research into a shared model of the user. Every subsequent design decision tested against that model.
- 04
Iterate from low to high fidelity
Multiple rounds of low-fidelity wireframes before moving to two high-fidelity mockup phases. Formative evaluation between phases refined the visual system, the navigation model, and the dark / purple-led aesthetic.
Design rationale
Three principles, every screen.
Cohesion & hierarchy
Every screen reads in the same direction: most urgent at the top, supportive content below. Consistent type rhythm and depth across all surfaces.
Calm by default
Dark surfaces with muted purple and warm accents reduce visual noise. The UI doesn't compete with the user's day.
Quiet community
Connection is opt-in and unrushed — no feeds, no follower counts. Just structured moments for users to meet and exchange.
Reflection
“Wellness apps win when they stop trying to hijack attention and start respecting it. Uniti was designed to be quiet, useful, and easy to leave — and that’s why students wanted to come back.”