Having grown and expanded over the last seven years, Never Alone Recovery had a vision for a mobile app that could elevate their support offerings, expand the organization’s reach, and, as a result, help more people.

I created the visual language for the app and conceptualized key features, including a recovery tracker and gamification elements, to support users in their mental health and recovery journeys.

Check out the app in soft launch now:

Designing and prototyping interactive elements, building a guided onboarding process, and creating a clean, intuitive interface required a balance between aesthetic appeal and user functionality, ensuring seamless navigation and effective informational hierarchies. 

Special attention was given to incorporating motivational and supportive elements to enhance user engagement and experience.

The app would target both males and females across a wide age range with one of the only criteria being basic tech literacy and familiarity with digital tools.

To create an accountability system, inspiration was drawn from a range of successful apps that see strong engagement through rewards and motivation:

• Duolingo uses streaks and badges to encourage consistent usage. I opted to introduce similar streak rewards and achievement badges into our app, recognizing that celebrating sobriety milestones could provide enough motivation to maintain their progress.
• Fitbit’s goal-setting and progress-tracking mechanisms also shaped our system, especially with how users can set personalized fitness goals and visually track their progress. This inspired us to create a system where users could set their own sobriety goals and milestones using things like progress bars and daily check-ins that can visualize their achievements and keep them focused on their goals.
• Waze might be an unexpected inspiration, but the platform’s real-time feedback mechanisms were a major influence on how we approached app notifications and updates. The main difficulty was balancing gentle nudges with real-time updates so that users would stay engaged and accountable without feeling overwhelmed.

The ability of the app to track sobriety milestones hinges on the user providing certain details, such as the date they became sober. Without this information, the app’s core features couldn’t be fully activated, which risked creating a restricted experience that could be off-putting to new users.

To minimize friction during onboarding, we broke the process into smaller steps. Instead of overwhelming users with a long form at the outset, we designed the onboarding flow to be conversational, asking for critical information at key moments.

To ensure users didn’t feel restricted, we also explored ways to let them experience key parts of the app even if they chose to skip certain steps during onboarding. For example, users could access general features or receive reminders to complete their profile later, allowing them to familiarize themselves with the app before fully committing. This progressive onboarding approach allowed users to ease into the experience while still capturing the essential information required for personalized functionality.

Ensuring that users could regularly engage with the app, accrue points or credit for their achievements, and track their progress without the experience feeling like a chore was a major priority. For this, we drew some inspiration from Noom, which uses psychology-based techniques to drive long-term behavior change through consistent but manageable daily check-ins. Noom’s emphasis on small, actionable steps inspired us to design a system that encouraged users to make daily progress without feeling overwhelmed. This daily engagement would build momentum, helping users stay on track with their sobriety goals.

Additionally, we looked at Strava for its social and community elements. Strava fosters motivation by encouraging users to compete against their own personal bests or with friends. This led us to consider ways in which we could incorporate peer accountability or group challenges into our sobriety-tracking system. By allowing users to share their progress with others, we could foster a supportive community atmosphere, which would motivate users to stay consistent in their sobriety journey.

Once again, we looked to Fitbit for its intuitive goal-setting and tracking features. We hoped to adopt a similar approach by making sobriety tracking simple and user-friendly, allowing users to log progress easily through daily or weekly entries. To ensure this felt seamless rather than cumbersome, we incorporated gentle reminders and quick-entry options, so users could track without feeling obligated to engage in a time-consuming process.

• Neutral colors paired with dark navy evoke professionalism, experience, and reassurance.
• Soothing rounded shapes instead of harsh corners and jagged lines.
• Minimal material design with a splash of glassmorphism to create a modern, sleek look.

• Application Dashboard: Featuring a persistent bottom navigation bar for easy access to core functionalities, this bottom dock remains fixed, overlaying all content within the app to ensure constant accessibility for the user.
• Slide-Out Navigation Drawer: A secondary menu accessible through a top-right icon, designed to overlay the main content and bottom dock, highlighting its importance when engaged.

• By the client’s request, Montserrat was the chosen as the display font for headings as well as most UI elements.
• Selected Fira Sans for body text.

Wireframes and mockups were created to visualize the app’s structure and flow. Interactive prototypes were developed to test and refine the user experience.

The app is designed as an on-demand source of innovative tools capable of supporting individuals as they transition from addiction or mental health challenges to sustainable health and well-being.

Given that relapse/recidivism is often a result of insufficient support, the app could help individuals to persevere through those difficult times. Or as things turn around, their progress can be incentivized through gamification elements.

These features ensure that users have the resources and motivation they need to achieve and maintain their recovery goals.

Designed to support users seeking a fresh start, the app features intuitive and accessible tools for tracking and rewarding progress, and providing on-demand support in times of crisis.

A pivotal feature conceptualized as an accountability tool with personalized overviews of users’ recovery journeys. A card-based dashboard layout provides dynamically-calculated figures like total days sober, money saved, and health improvements. 

Users can then share their milestones on social media, turning raw data into motivational achievements.

Incorporating elements of gamification to encourage not only continued use and engagement with the app but should also decrease risk of relapse. 

Rewards and incentives are provided for reaching milestones, fostering a sense of accomplishment and motivation.

The app’s development cycle followed a conventional structured timeline to ensure each phase, from initial ideation to post-launch evaluation, was managed in such a way as to create a seamless and effective user experience.

Here are the key stages and milestones that guided the project to its successful completion.

The app I designed for Never Alone Recovery will provide comprehensive support for individuals on their recovery journeys. Through careful planning, design, and development, the app will provide users with an intuitive, user-friendly experience with features that empowers them to track their progress and stay motivated.

This case study, though still a work-in-progress, breaks down some of my process and dedication involved in creating a tool that aims to make a meaningful impact on mental health and recovery.