Affirma
How I designed an affirmations app and improved user satisfaction from 84% to 90%
In this case study, I’ll show you how I built a minimal affirmations app. Why I include certain buttons on the home screen. Why I ended up simplifying the user interface after testing. And how it made me a better designer by teaching me the importance of design principles and usability interviews.
Role: Lead product designer
Team: Solo project
Year: 2025
Timeline: 2 weeks
Challenges
How might we…
I posed two questions that will anchor how I got to an improved user satisfaction rate:
How might we display themes?
How might we display categories?
Solving for whom?
Users who want a minimal, clean, and calming experience.
Users who want to radiate positivity and improve self-talk and self-confidence.
Process
Design Principles
I established some design principles early on to help support the app design.
Minimalist
Calming
Minimalist. Affirma will have a minimal feel, only showing what’s necessary at any given moment. The user interface will be decluttered and simple. When information needs to be accessed, it will be clear.
Calming. Affirma will have a calming, friendly tone. Specific language will be used to invoke this. A minimal interface will make things less busy. Plenty of white space will allow users to breathe.
From the above, I wanted the user interface to be decluttered and simple with a clear, friendly tone. Having a minimal user interface with plenty of white space will allow users to breathe, creating a relaxing, calming experience.
These principles were also stated in the user interviews.
User Interviews
I asked, "What do you like or dislike about affirmation apps?" All 3 users who I interviewed said variations of its minimal and simple.
I also asked, "If you were designing your ideal affirmations app, what features would it have?" Here themes and categories came up all 3 times.
I knew now that with my design principles in tow, I would need to design a simple interface that included themes and categories.
Looking at Competitors
Although not all minimal, from a competitive analysis, I saw that each competitor included themes and categories in their main home screen user interface.
After working on other deliverables, like starting low-fidelity wireframes, and doing personas, I then went to my user journey map. Here I built in themes and categories.
A User’s Journey
From awareness to retention, the experience for a user is calming and minimal. I carried these principles throughout the map.
Categories were placed in onboarding. From my analysis, this is where users could interact with them first.
I placed themes in daily use and retention. At any time users could change their theme depending on what mood they're in. Releasing new themes would also help retain users and keep them loyal.
After creating user flows and an application flow, it was now time to wireframe a minimal user interface featuring themes and categories.
Wireframes
The home / affirmation screen shows a minimal user interface with only 5 buttons and the affirmation. Buttons include:
Share
Favorite
Categories
Themes
Menu
This screen is what ultimately changes to improve the user satisfaction rate.
Categories are simply a list of options with a checkmark button for each. There is a prominent call to action to have users write their affirmations. There aren't any illustrations cluttering the app like our competitors have done.
Themes have a dominant create your own theme call to action. Along with tags to filter themes by. A save button confirms the user's selection.
Prototyping
The wireframe user interface is created in high fidelity and transferred to a first-iteration prototype.
Testing the Prototype
Then, I conducted a usability test and a 5-second test. In the usability test, I tasked users to:
Favorite an affirmation
Select some categories
Select a theme they like
I asked a follow-up question afterward. "What did you like least about the app?" One of the responses was telling. They said that there were too many buttons on the home screen.
When conducting a post-testing system usability scale (SUS) questionnaire, this same person scored lower than the other two. This brought the overall SUS score to 84.
84%
SUS Score
Iterating on Feedback
From the feedback received, I decided to move the categories and themes buttons to the menu. This cleared up the user interface on the home screen and made the experience more minimal.
Pertaining to the design principles I set in the beginning, this was the right move. I needed the user interface to be as minimal as possible to create a calming experience.
Testing (Again)
I conducted my second round of usability testing with the same users. This time I asked users to do the following:
Unfavorite an affirmation
Favorite an affirmation from your history
Change the frequency of reminders
After testing, I conducted another SUS questionnaire. All 3 users scored higher, improving the user satisfaction rate to 90.
90%
SUS Score
Solution
Impact
The original challenge was to design a minimal user interface that included themes and categories. Based on feedback, I iterated the design and changed the home screen to have 3 buttons instead of 5.
This change improved SUS scores by 7.1%.
Learnings
This project taught me the significance of designing with design principles in mind. It’s important to lay out design principles initially during a project brief or later in a design brief. These principles lay the foundation for the whole design. They provide for consistency, and faster decision-making, keeping users at the center of the design.
It also taught me the importance of conducting usability interviews and SUS scores. Asking post-testing questions and conducting SUS questionnaires allowed me to gauge feedback for the design. Making changes became positive, as they were reflected back with the new score.