Your Daily 2.0
Moving an app beyond a two-year beta program by incorporating an AI Health Coach to give users a more guided journey on their way to healing.
Project Overview
Project timing: three-week sprint in December 2025
Client: Shawna, founder and visionary behind Your Daily
Team structure: I was a member of a five-person UX team
Role: UX Designer
A note on this case study: I focus mainly on my portion of the solution, interspersed with moments of ‘we’ activities.
Product Overview
Your Daily is a mobile app focused on supporting users’ gut health by improving mental wellness, emotional regulation, and daily habits. While the app successfully provided users tools to reflect on their mental state, a critical user need remained unmet: support during moments of acute emotional distress. Users often opened the app precisely when they felt overwhelmed—yet those were the moments when existing features were hardest to use.
To address this gap, I designed a feature called SOS Playbooks—personalized, dynamic action guides that help users navigate moments of crisis with clarity, compassion, and minimal cognitive effort. This case study outlines the UX process behind this feature, from understanding existing research insights to design decisions and outcomes.
Research & Discovery
Shawna came to the table armed with extensive research: everything from the persona to competition to comparators to inspiration. So the first part of this project was simply working hard to review all of her information, ask questions, and get up to speed as quickly as possible.
Three key insights emerged:
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Stress collapses choice.
When users are overwhelmed, even simple decisions feel impossible. Presenting multiple options increases anxiety rather than reducing it.
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Personal language builds trust.
Shawna wanted to move away from more technical language and impart more of a conversational, “I got you” tone of voice for users to build trust and humanize an AI experience.
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Mental, physical, and emotional calm must come before understanding why someone is feeling dysregulated.
Users can’t be in a state of dysregulation and understand its origins, so the app must guide them to a better state before educating them. Emotional acknowledgment (“This is hard”) is also important along their healing journey.
Overall, we need to meet users where they are at - which can vary day by day or even hour by hour.
Persona
While Shawna brought this to the table after years of research, I want to include it so that you get a strong sense for the user.
Problem Statement
Entering the project with much of the research complete, our work started at truly defining the task at hand via our problem statement:
Your Daily® users have access to powerful nervous system tools, but they lack a personalized daily plan and consistent guidance to help them progress from symptom relief to lasting transformation, leaving them unsure what to do each day or how to build momentum in their healing journey. Your Daily 2.0 will offer users personalized daily coaching that meets them where they are, where users move from “I have access to a library of tools” to “I have a clear path forward, and someone guiding me through it every day.”
Ideation
As a team, we identified five separate tasks for users opening the app:
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Onboarding: the intake form and process for new users of the app that sets up their plan;
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Daily Check-In: a once-daily temperature check for an existing user of the app;
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Daily Plan: recommended activities, exercises, etc. for a user based on their day;
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Immediate Help + Long-Term Understanding: a library of tools for existing users both in distress mode and those ready to change their underlying habits; and
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My Patterns: an existing user’s view into what emotional states and issues they experience most frequently for a more in-depth personal understanding.
My area was Immediate Help + Long-Term Understanding. The Design Challenge: How might we help users regulate and ground themselves during moments of distress while preserving a sense of autonomy and emotional safety?
Navigation
This would be an entirely new concept in the app, so the first step was adding it to the navigational bar. But what to call it, when users would need to access it across the spectrum of completely dysregulated to regulated and ready for understanding? As a mobile app, real estate is expensive so short is a requirement. Ultimately the consensus was: Help Me.
Ideation
I started by sketching, and if you're wondering why all of my sketches are on graph paper, it's because I bought a pack for a small project and am now using the rest for sketches.
Wireframing
Remember the five app sections that I outlined above? Even though I was only responsible for one of them, I went ahead and wireframed all five in Figma. Why? You may ask. Because as a newly-minted Figma user, I need all the practise I can get. Here's a link to the Figma file.
Iteration
One of the things that went really well for us in this project was, well first - having a very participatory and responsive client in Shawna - but second, we had standups every other day with her for discussion points as well as design reviews. Three weeks is not a long time to redesign an app, so getting concepts in front of her earlier in the process let us quickly course-correct when needed.
As it turns out, my first iteration of Help Me was, to be blunt, wrong.
My design had playbooks encompassing both tools for immediate relief as well as educational tools that help explain to a user the why behind their symptoms. Shawna clarified that when a person is experiencing an acute stress response (you might know this as 'fight or flight', which now includes fawn, freeze, and flop), they can't cognitively process any educational information - they need to calm their nervous system down first. Therefore, help me needed to be broken down into two main flows:
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I need help NOW - this became SOS Playbooks, centered around immediate nervous system upset
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Overall learning - tools and information to understand the nervous system upsets for a user who is in a regulated state
HiFi
Your Daily already had an established brand guide with color palette and fonts, so the 2.0 designs aligned with it.
The Help Me section ended up including these features:
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SOS Playbooks: the AI Coach walks a user through a set of tools to get immediate relief from symptoms
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Learn: the AI Coach talks a user through why they might be experiencing those symptoms
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Library: a catalog of exercises, meditations, and sound bites that users can browse as needed
Here is a walkthrough of an example playbook for a user who has a migraine. The AI Coach is present the whole time, asking questions with simple button answers. Users can also always bypass the flow and type in the chat. If they use a tool or technique that they like, they can bookmark it for later use.
In Conclusion
The final step of this project was to present our work and designs to Shawna. If you would like to watch her reaction and feedback, here is the video.
Her goal is to launch 2.0 sometime in the first half of 2026, though as she notes in her comments that she's already started implementing some of the ideas we brought to the table (specifically around Playbooks). While her kind words were nice to hear, hearing her take an idea and actually build it was very fulfilling!