Glow
Helping women understand and manage PCOS
through positive approch in everyday life
Role
UX Researcher + UI Designer
Duration
1 Month
Tools
Figma , FigJam
Overview
Glow is a PCOS companion app that shifts the experience from clinical, number-focused tracking to a supportive daily journey helping women build sustainable habits, understand their bodies, and feel less alone in managing a lifelong condition.
Challenge
PCOS affects a significant number of women in India, yet most tools stop at symptom tracking. Through interviews with PCOS patients and gynecologists, we found the real barrier wasn't information it was consistency, emotional support, and trust in what actually works.
Solution
A holistic companion app that combines symptom tracking with gentle, personalised guidance celebrating small wins, not just scale numbers.
Process Followed
Research
Goal was to understand what actually stops women with PCOS from managing it consistently
beyond just symptoms, and beyond what existing apps already track.
Secondary Research
Key Insights
PCOS affects a large number of women in India, but awareness and consistent care remain low
Most existing solutions focus on symptom tracking, not on helping women sustain lifestyle changes
There's a clear research gap around emotional and mental health support for PCOS most literature focuses on physical symptoms alone
Primary Research
Spoke directly with women diagnosed with PCOS and with gynaecologists through interviews
and surveys to hear real experiences, not just documented ones.
Interview + Survey
Key Insights
Women often feel dismissed or misunderstood, even by close family, when it comes to the emotional side of PCOS
Diagnosis itself is stressful confusing tests, long fasting requirements, and doctors delivering results with little emotional support
Many give up on lifestyle changes quickly because results aren't visible fast enough "nothing is changing, is this even working?"
Reliable information is hard to find; most turn to random sources online, which increases anxiety instead of easing it
Side effects from medication (nausea, mood swings) are rarely acknowledged or explained in advance
Research Synthesis
Mapped every conversation and survey response using empathy mapping, affinity mapping, and flow/sequence models to see patterns across users instead of treating each response as a one-off.
Defining User Problems
Who we're designing for
The core problem
Women with PCOS aren't failing to manage their condition because they lack information they're falling off because there's no real emotional support, and no visible sense of progress to keep them going.
Ideation
Mind Map
Branched out from our HMW into as many possible solution directions as we could from tracking features to community features to gamification without filtering ideas too early.
5 Whys technique
Used 5 Whys to dig past the surface problem ("women don't stick to lifestyle changes") down to the real root cause lack of visible progress and emotional support, not lack of willpower or knowledge.
Design Direction
Helping women understand their bodies better
Helping them manage daily habits realistically
Helping them feel supported rather than alone
Solution
Glow is a PCOS companion app that combines personalized tracking, gamified consistency, and community support designed around emotional progress, not just clinical numbers.
Manage
Gamification to build consistency small, visible wins that keep
motivation alive even when physical results take time to show.
Understand
Personalized tracking of symptoms, cycles, and lifestyle metrics
presented in a way that explains what's happening, not just logs data.
Feel supported
A community-driven layer shared goals, peer connection, and direct
support addressing the isolation that came up repeatedly in research.
Most competitor apps solve for tracking. We deliberately chose not to compete there our research
showed the real drop-off wasn't from lack of data, but lack of motivation and support. So we built
around habit consistency and community first, tracking second.
Information architecture
Manage : Home Dashboard
Understand : Symptoms & mood tracking
Support : Community and Articles
Impacts and Validation
We went back to some of the women we'd originally interviewed and shared the design with them
Goal was check if the solution actually reflected what they'd told us, not just what we assumed
Community and emotional-support features resonated the most several said they'd never seen a
PCOS app address isolation, not just physical symptoms