We wrote a one-page document at the start of the project called "What this app is not." It said: not a social network, not a game, not a wellness coach, not a notification machine, not a streak tracker, not a community, not an advisor, not a friend.
The first version of the home screen had a "log today" button, a "your stats" card, a "cycle insight of the day" tip, and a soft animated flower in the background. The flower bloomed when you logged. It didn't make it past the second day. It was the kind of thing that delighted a designer and patronized a user.
Calm is a feature, not an aesthetic.
A calm interface isn't just one with muted colors and serif type. It's one that doesn't ask you for attention. The number of micro-decisions you have to make in an app is the actual measure of how calming it is — not how soft the gradients are.
TeenCycle has three screens. Each screen has, at most, one decision on it. The home screen has one button. The calendar has tap-to-edit. Settings is a list. There is no place in the app where you have to choose between five things.
The hardest design decision we made.
It was leaving things out. Every feature we left out is a small loss of utility for some user — but a big gain in clarity for every user. The math on additions versus subtractions is asymmetric: subtraction compounds, addition fragments. We covered the specifics in what we left out.
"Subtraction compounds. Addition fragments."
— our internal design principles, line 3
It's an unfashionable position. Most product design rewards adding — features, flows, microcopy, animation, options. But the apps we love the most, the ones that don't make us feel anxious, are usually the ones that did the work to take things out.
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