Pace

Pace was a project for the AAPD product design bootcamp. The brief and user scenario came from the course. I made the design calls, built the design system and interface, and wrote the code to ship it.

You say one sentence, a small sun says one back, and it goes into your days. No streaks, no completion rings, no red dots. Days with nothing in them stay blank.

Their complaints had nothing in common, but they all pointed the same way: the apps they had only told them how badly they were doing.

When you don't show up, health apps mark the day and break your streak. Pace treats a blank day as just a day. That one choice shaped the rest: the timeline leaves blank days blank, and the weekly review is a paragraph, not a completion rate.

Today, Days and Review. Recording is an action, not a place: listening, the reply and saving all happen on the same screen, so it never feels like homework you have to go and do.

Problem. A gentle app is easy when everything works. The real test is what it says when speech recognition fails.

What I did. I made two versions. A keeps the sun on screen: "I didn't quite catch that, that's on me", with two ways out, say it again or type instead. B is a standard system error: a red triangle, "check your network", and one retry button. Each person got a single link, so nobody knew they were comparing anything.

Result. A won, and everyone's reason was the sun still being there. People described B as "being told off".

One participant misspoke halfway through and wanted a way to not keep that entry, without it counting as a deletion. It now sits under the save button. It's the only screen in the project that came from a user rather than from me.

Problem. A blank day is exactly what other health apps punish.

What I did. With nothing recorded, Today only says: "Nothing yet today. Say one thing, that's enough." No badge, no red dot, no nudge. The weekly review doesn't say "5 of 7 days". It says the blank days are part of the week too.

Moods are five named states, from Worn out to Energised, never turned into a score. There is no red in the palette: the strongest colour is the terracotta used for the main action, so an error can never be louder than an invitation. The four principles are written as rules you can settle an argument with.

Problem. A model writes each reply on the spot, and a model's default habits (sympathy, three suggestions, see you tomorrow) break every one of Pace's principles.

What I did. I wrote the tone as a spec: one or two sentences, no numbers, no advice unless asked, never mention tomorrow. Every reply goes through a rule check before anyone sees it, and gets rewritten if it fails. Then I wrote 32 test cases to score it.

Result. The hard rules passed on the first run. The difficult part was empty replies like "so tired" that would fit under anyone's sentence. Example replies and a minimum length took the score from 47% to 56%, ending at 19 of 29.

The model is a small open model on Cloudflare: it doesn't train on what people say, and it replies in 1.3 seconds. A larger one wrote better but took 12.8.

Figma for design, Claude Code for the code, Cloudflare to ship it. Building it showed things a static mockup couldn't. The saved card said "saved to your days" but still offered two buttons underneath. Now it has one: Got it.