Pulse
Product Design
Duration:
10 Weeks
Industry:
Health Tech
A mobile app that helps people understand their heart health without drowning them in charts.
Pulse pairs with a wearable to track heart rate, sleep and recovery. Early users loved the data but felt overwhelmed by it. We redesigned the app around one daily question: how ready are you today? Everything else supports that answer, from a simple readiness score to gentle weekly trends.
Before designing anything, we spent time with the Pulse team to understand how they talk about their work, who they are trying to reach and what makes them different in health tech. We mapped their audiences, collected examples of what they liked and disliked, and agreed on a small set of principles that every decision would be measured against.
The final work was shaped through several rounds of sketches, prototypes and real-world tests. We checked every element in the places people would actually see it, refined the details that mattered most and removed anything that did not earn its place. The result is a system that feels considered and personal, and that the Pulse team can confidently grow on their own.
Medical accuracy could not be traded for simplicity. Every number shown needed context, and the app had to stay useful for both casual users and people managing a real condition.
Like many teams in health tech, Pulse had grown quickly and their materials had drifted apart over time. Different people had made different choices, and the result was a brand that felt inconsistent depending on where you met it. Fixing that without slowing the team down was a key part of the brief.
There were also practical limits. The budget and timeline were tight, and the team needed something they could maintain themselves after launch. Every idea had to be ambitious enough to make a real difference, yet simple enough to survive daily use by people who are not designers.
We built a layered interface. The home screen gives a clear daily summary, and each card opens into deeper detail with plain language explanations. Usability tests showed users understood their score twice as fast as in the old app.
We documented everything in a clear, practical guide and built ready-to-use templates for the most common needs. Instead of a heavy rulebook, the guide focuses on a few core principles, real examples and simple do and don’t comparisons so anyone on the team can make good decisions quickly.
After launch we stayed involved for a few weeks to support the rollout, answer questions and fine-tune details based on feedback. Pulse now has a foundation that feels like a true reflection of who they are, and the team reports that creating new materials is faster and far more consistent than before.