Redesigned a fitness nutrition mobile app, increasing ARR by $1M and daily active users by 51%.
Eat to Perform had a functional product with a loyal user base but a dated mobile experience that was creating friction, driving support costs, and limiting growth. This project focused on modernizing the app across iOS and Android while preserving what worked and fixing what held users back.
Impact
What drove our strategy...
Goals
- Reduce support volume by designing core workflows to be intuitive and self-service
- Increase daily engagement and retention by simplifying repeated tracking tasks
- Modernize the experience to match user expectations for contemporary health and fitness apps
User Frustrations
- The app felt cluttered and visually outdated, making it difficult to focus on daily tracking tasks
- Navigation patterns were inconsistent across sections, increasing cognitive load
- Users frequently relied on support for actions that should have been simple and self-service
- Important data lacked clear hierarchy, making insights harder to interpret
Personas
- Anita (casual user) - Focused on maintaining healthy habits and tracking basic metrics. She needed clarity, reminders, and simple progress visibility without overwhelming complexity.
- Bill (enthusiast) - Highly engaged and performance-driven. He required fast access to detailed metrics, flexible logging, and confidence that his effort translated into measurable progress.
Where do we start?
Current state audit
Reviewed the existing app end to end to document usability issues, visual inconsistencies, and workflow gaps. This gave us a shared baseline of what needed to change and what was working.
Competitive analysis
Analyzed leading health and fitness apps to understand common patterns, interaction models, and visual standards users would expect from a modern nutrition tracking experience.
User flow mapping
Mapped existing user flows to identify friction points, unnecessary steps, and areas where users were most likely to drop off or contact support.
Early paper sketches
Before jumping into digital tools, I started with paper sketches to rapidly explore layout concepts and information hierarchy. This low-fidelity approach helped surface structural questions early and kept the focus on usability rather than visual polish.
What did we
learn?
Improve the overall UI and UX
The existing experience introduced unnecessary cognitive load through inconsistent layouts, weak hierarchy, and dated visual patterns. Users were spending time navigating the interface instead of focusing on their goals.
This reinforced the need to prioritize clarity and consistency across the system, establishing predictable patterns that reduced friction in daily tracking workflows.
Understand what is actually being used
Feature usage was uneven. Core flows like macro tracking and meal logging drove daily engagement, while other areas saw limited interaction.
Recognizing this distinction helped focus design effort where it mattered most. High-traffic workflows were streamlined and clarified, while underused features were simplified or repositioned to reduce noise.
Target our primary personas
The product attempted to serve too many use cases equally, resulting in an experience that felt diluted. By anchoring decisions around the primary athlete persona, we were able to create stronger focus and clearer prioritization.
Design choices were filtered through what this core user needed most: fast access to tracking, meaningful progress feedback, and minimal friction in recurring tasks.
Design System
I established a focused design system to bring structure and consistency to the evolving product. This included a defined color palette, typographic scale, spacing framework, and a reusable component library.
Introducing this system early gave the development team a clear foundation to build from, reducing ambiguity and ensuring the interface remained cohesive as new features were added.
Prioritization and Alignment
The redesign was well received, but turning momentum into execution required careful prioritization. Strong leadership ownership of the product made sequencing and committing to change more complex than the design work itself.
To move forward, I partnered with engineering leadership to clarify scope and demonstrate that the updates could be implemented with minimal disruption. I reframed discussions around measurable impact, highlighting improvements in usability, reduced time on task, stronger structural consistency, and a more competitive overall experience.
Grounding decisions in user behavior and business impact helped align stakeholders around a phased rollout and focus on the changes that would drive the most immediate value.
Final Screens
The final designs brought together all of our research and iteration into a cohesive, modern mobile experience. Each screen was designed to reduce friction in daily workflows, surface the most important information first, and maintain visual consistency throughout.
Nutrition Dashboard
Weight Dashboard
Activity Dashboard
Weekly Plan
Journal
Manual Entry - Nutrition
Message Coach
Settings
Measuring and Validating Designs
We validated the redesign through analytics, engagement metrics, and moderated sessions with internal services and support staff who regularly interacted with end users. This combination of behavioral data and qualitative feedback confirmed where usability improvements were having the greatest impact.
These results reflected the cumulative impact of simplifying high-frequency workflows, clarifying data hierarchy, and reducing friction in daily tracking tasks.
Research Feedback
Post-launch research consistently highlighted improved discoverability and clearer access to core actions, such as logging macros directly from the main screen. Users reported spending less time navigating the interface and more time engaging with their goals.
Support teams also observed a measurable decline in tickets tied to routine usage questions, reinforcing that the redesign addressed structural usability issues rather than surface-level aesthetics.
Results and Reflection
The strongest gains came from disciplined simplification rather than feature expansion. By focusing on clarity, consistency, and high-frequency workflows, we were able to modernize the experience without increasing complexity.
This project reinforced the value of anchoring design decisions in measurable behavior and prioritizing structural improvements over visual novelty. The result was a product that felt more intuitive, more modern, and demonstrably more effective for its core users.
