Tend. Hanna de Vries

Decision · 01

Should a missed dose break the streak?

Loss aversion is the strongest mechanic available here, and an unbroken streak is the reason people open the app. It is also the reason they delete it. I chose to keep the streak but let it survive a single miss, because the alternative punishes exactly the person the product exists for. Someone managing a chronic condition will miss doses. If the first slip zeroes months of effort, the honest response is to stop looking.

Considered and dropped

Strict streak

One miss resets to zero. Maximum loss aversion, and the failure mode is abandonment at the first bad week.

No streak

Adherence percentage only. Emotionally inert, and it removed the single strongest reason to open the app daily.

Built. Forgiving streak

The streak absorbs one miss before it breaks. Progress rings and weekly adherence carry the honest number underneath.

Trade-off

A forgiving streak is a less accurate signal. Someone can look consistent in the interface while their real adherence drifts, and the weekly ring is doing quiet work the streak number hides. A clinician reading this screen would want the raw figure first.

Decision · 02

What does a medication get attached to?

The behavioral premise is implementation intention: a new behavior sticks when it is anchored to an existing one. That gave me a choice about what the primary object in the app is. I made the medication the anchor and hung a small routine off it, so Levothyroxine carries drink water and ten minutes of sunlight rather than sitting in a list of its own.

Considered and dropped

Time-based list

Medications grouped by clock time, the pattern every pillbox app uses. Easy to build, and it anchors the dose to a number rather than to anything the person does.

Built, medication as anchor

Each medication owns a habit stack. The dose becomes the trigger for a routine instead of an isolated task.

Built. One daily surface

Today collapses medications, habits and progress into a single glanceable screen so the anchor is the first thing seen.

Trade-off

Anchoring to the medication breaks down for anyone on a complex regimen. At eight or nine daily medications the stacks compete, and the screen becomes the dense clinical list I was trying to avoid. The design holds for a handful of medications and degrades past that.

Decision · 03

How warm can a medication app get before it stops being credible?

Gamified health products tend to land in one of two bad places, hospital-portal cold or cartoon-sticker cheerful, and adults managing a chronic condition reject both. I built the visual system on wellness references rather than clinical ones, cream and peach and terracotta with a soft glass surface, and kept the copy plain. The mechanics are borrowed from streak apps while the surface deliberately is not.

Considered and dropped

Clinical register

Neutral greys, dense data, the register of a patient portal. Trustworthy and unopenable.

Built. Warm onboarding

The first screen sets the register before any medication is entered. Warm accent colour, plain language, no clinical framing.

Built, the same register throughout

Profile and settings hold the warmth rather than reverting to a clinical grey once the mechanics stop.

Trade-off

The warmth costs information density. Dose timing, interaction warnings and symptom history all want a tighter, plainer layout than this system gives them, and those screens are the weakest part of the product.

Tend

Reminder apps solve the wrong half of medication adherence.

A daily view built around momentum

Medications as behavioral anchors

Progress that compounds

The hard calls, and what they cost.

Should a missed dose break the streak?

What does a medication get attached to?

How warm can a medication app get before it stops being credible?

The full experience

Habit stacking is the mechanism

What I’d revisit

Vela