The Product team comprised me, another Product Designer I was mentoring, Content Designer, Product Manager, and UX researcher.

As the lead designer for wearables at Flo, I led the holistic user experience—from research and prototyping to information architecture and visual design—while collaborating with diverse stakeholders, including medical and legal teams.

Our approach followed a structured yet flexible process: first, we focused on understanding the problem space — diving deep into user needs, existing behaviors, and the broader sleep ecosystem to uncover key challenges and opportunities. Once we had a clear direction, we built a proof of concept to validate our assumptions and test the core experience early. From there, we entered an iterative cycle of design, feedback, and refinement — improving the UX with each round to ensure the solution felt seamless, valuable, and aligned with user expectations.

As usual, when stepping into a new problem space — in this case, sleep — it was important to start with a solid discovery phase. We needed to understand users’ existing behaviors, pain points, and motivations around tracking and improving their sleep. Once we had a clearer picture of the landscape, we moved into ideation — exploring a wide range of concepts that could make the sleep experience more engaging, useful, and personal. Through workshops and quick iterations, we refined these ideas into tangible directions that could later be tested and validated.

The first step focused on creating a daily sleep story — a narrative-style experience designed to help users better understand their sleep. Instead of showing raw graphs or metrics, we turned the data into a clear, human story split into four simple parts:

• Summary — gives a quick overview of sleep quality and how it compares to recommended hours.
• Schedule — highlights how consistently users go to bed and wake up.
• Awakenings — provides context for night interruptions in a supportive, non-judgmental way.
• Advice — offers a short takeaway that connects sleep behavior with overall well-being.

This phase directly addressed core user needs: ensuring they get enough restful sleep to feel energized, understanding the factors that influence their sleep, and recognizing what might be disrupting it. By making sleep insights feel more personal and approachable, the daily story encouraged reflection and gradual improvement in sleep habits.

Once the daily sleep story was in place and proving valuable, the next challenge was to expand the experience so it could reach more users, feel relevant from day one, and become a natural part of the product ecosystem. This meant shifting from a single core insight toward a more accessible and flexible sleep system. The focus moved to accessibility and reach (like adding phone-based tracking), supporting users even without long-term data, and making sleep insights more visible and personal through the homescreen feed. In other words, evolving from a feature you open into a feature that meets you where you are.

To unlock sleep insights for more users, we introduced phone-based sleep tracking — a major step in making the experience more accessible. Instead of requiring a wearable, users could now rely on their phone’s sensors to track sleep. This not only lowered the barrier to entry but also significantly expanded the active user base. From a product perspective, it turned sleep insights into something instantly available, helping users experience the value sooner, while also supporting business growth through a wider funnel and better feature adoption.

To support sleep insights from day one, we had to rethink how quickly value could be delivered. One key step was optimizing the sleep score algorithm so it required just two nights of data instead of seven. We applied the same principle to the sleep schedule recommendations. For users with less than two days of sleep data, we designed a lightweight version of the story — one that still shows time asleep, awakening patterns, and useful context, even if the score and schedule recommendations aren’t ready yet. This allowed us to keep users engaged from the start and build trust while the system learned their patterns.

To make sleep insights feel more present and meaningful in users’ daily routines, we introduced a dedicated sleep card in the homescreen feed. This shift aligned directly with key jobs-to-be-done — helping users stay aware of their sleep quality, understand what affects it, and feel more in control of their overall well-being.

The impact was immediate. This sleep card became the best-performing card in the feed. It proved that when insights are timely, relevant, and easy to access, users feel more connected and motivated to act.

The daily sleep story helped users understand their sleep in a clear, human way, while the homescreen sleep card reinforced those insights throughout their day. By introducing phone-based tracking, we made sleep insights available to a much wider audience — removing the wearable barrier and expanding the feature’s reach. Optimizing our algorithms allowed users to access sleep scores and deeper insights sooner, increasing early engagement and trust. Altogether, these changes led to stronger retention and deeper user connection to their health data.

This project reminded me that great UX is more about timing and making things accessible than depth alone. Working for users with all kinds of data—some, none, or just a bit—made us really focus on what’s clear and helpful. Simple tweaks, like faster insights or showing users what they need right away, made a big difference.