Align App UX/UI Design Project

Align is a guided daily routine app designed for people who want to build a healthier, more mindful start to their day. It brings together meditation, affirmations, movement, sunlight exposure, journaling, and daily planning into one calm, intentional flow - making it easier to show up consistently without the overwhelm of building a routine from scratch. My role was end-to-end: UX research, interaction design, UI design, and branding.

Most people know what a good morning looks like - they just can't seem to execute it. The problem isn't motivation; it's structure. Without a clear, low-friction flow to follow, the day starts reactively instead of intentionally. Existing wellness apps either do too much (overwhelming feature sets) or too little (single-purpose habit trackers that don't connect into a real routine). Align was designed to bridge that gap - a single, sequenced flow that holds your hand through a mindful morning, every day.

I spoke with people who had tried and struggled to maintain morning routines to understand where things broke down. Three patterns came up consistently:

People wanted a routine but didn't know where to start or in what order

They'd downloaded multiple separate apps (one for meditation, one for journaling, one for workouts) and the context-switching killed the habit

When they missed a day, there was no soft re-entry, it felt like starting over, which led to abandonment

These insights directly shaped Align's core design principle: one continuous flow, one app, time-tagged sessions so you always know what fits your morning, afternoon, or evening.

Time-of-day tagging (Morning / Afternoon / Evening) - Most wellness apps ignore context. A 30-minute movement session isn't right for 9 PM. By tagging each session with a time of day and letting users filter by it, Align helps people find what actually fits their current moment, making them more likely to start.

Dark, immersive UI with soft purple glows - Wellness is not a productivity category. A harsh, clinical interface would undermine the experience. The deep dark background with ambient purple gradients creates a calm, contained environment, the kind of space you actually want to spend quiet morning time in.

Minimal bottom navigation (3 items) - The navigation is deliberately sparse: a home grid, a quick-add, and a progress view. No buried menus, no settings rabbit holes. The app's job is to reduce friction, and the navigation reflects that.

Meditation player with progress scrubber - The playback screen treats guided sessions like a premium audio experience - large central illustration, clean playback controls, and a progress bar showing time elapsed vs. total. This removes the anxiety of not knowing how long something will take, which is a known barrier to starting.

Card-based session list - Each session card shows the title, duration tag, and time-of-day tag at a glance. No walls of text. You make the decision to start in under two seconds.

Splash / Onboarding - "The first thing you see is a promise: Where your day finds its balance. Clean, grounded, intentional - setting the tone before you tap anything."

My Plan for Today - "A filtered list of sessions organised by time of day. Morning, afternoon, evening - tap the tag and see only what fits right now. No scrolling through irrelevant content."

Meditation Player - "A focused, distraction-free playback experience. The progress bar answers the question everyone has before starting: how long will this actually take?"

Align taught me that wellness design is fundamentally about trust. Users won't start a routine unless the app feels calm enough to enter, simple enough to follow, and honest enough about how long things take. The biggest design challenge wasn't the screens themselves, it was making the whole experience feel like it was on your side. If I were to take this further, I would conduct diary studies with users over two weeks to understand where the habit breaks down, introduce a gentle streak and re-entry system for missed days, and explore how the flow adapts as users' routines evolve over time.