SoulfulIn development 2026

Redesigning daily affirmations

Role: Product Owner and Designer
Skills: Figma, Xcode, Framer, Supabase, Claude Code

Challenge

Reinventing an established category

With Soulful I set out to build an affirmations app that doesn’t treat the content as something to be passively consumed, but something to be practiced intentionally. This required rethinking the category from the ground up.

My high level goals were to:

Identify the specific feature gap through competitive analysis
Design a feedback loop that converts intention-setting into action

Problem

The category is stuck in the wrong loop

I tested 5 popular affirmation apps over a week. The overall experience was remarkably similar across all of them: select a category, swipe through affirmations, favorite them, and loop back. The experience began and ended with infinite scroll.

LEADING AFFIRMATION APPS

Passive consumption loop

PROPOSED APPROACH

Intentional practice

Soulful replaces the open-ended browse with a single affirmation practiced through to a close.

Without a bridge from intention to action, the apps become digital quote collections.

Design question

How can practice prompts tied to specific affirmations strengthen the user experience?

A 2006 meta-analysis across 94 studies on implementation intentions — Gollwitzer's work on if-then plans — found moderate-to-large effects on goal achievement when people specified when and where they'd act on an intention, not just what they wanted to change.

Exploration

The missing link

Bridging this gap meant building a path from reading to doing. I experimented with several approaches, including a multi-step "flow" model that walked users through a series of micro-practices in sequence, before letting them pick one to complete later.

This model still relied on an infinite-scroll feed of affirmations.

The flow-model walkthrough across six screens: a practice prompt on an affirmation, a breathing transition, auto-generated micro-practices (slow grounding breaths, writing a gratitude note), an intention-setting transition, a screen to pick one practice to complete later, and a practice-complete summary with saved practices — An early exploration of a session flow.

In early prototype testing, users found the flow model too cumbersome. The sequential format also created a design constraint: most practices had to be completable in the moment, which limited the range of practices that could be included.

Solution

One goal, one affirmation

The unlock came when I stripped away the infinite feed in favor of a more structured approach.

This new model allowed the user to pick an area of work (e.g. perfectionism, over-thinking) and tie it to one specific affirmation of their choice.

The chosen affirmation would be practiced daily for a set amount of time (e.g. 2 weeks) through specific actionable prompts.

A working board mapping the practice model: a grid of focus areas with their everyday triggers, a 14-day Notice–Try–Reflect practice arc for a people-pleasing example, the one-time setup (focus area, named moments, phrase, duration) and daily morning/midday/evening structure, alongside screen mockups for choosing a focus, picking moments, choosing a phrase, setting a duration, and the daily check-ins — Explorations on format, contents and design philosophy.

Onboarding

Daily user flow

Reflection

What I learned

A bounded period changes the contract

Open-ended affirmation feeds let the user off the hook by never asking them to finish. Committing to one phrase for a fixed length — and ending with a real reflection — was what made the practice land.