Designing an MVP for a Digital Health Startup
Budy is an early-stage digital health startup designed to help people living with obesity build sustainable healthy habits through personalised daily tasks, peer accountability and behavioural support.
As Lead Product Designer, I worked closely with the founder and developers to shape the product from discovery through to MVP. My role extended beyond interface design, contributing to user research, product strategy, analytics, interaction design and developer handoff throughout the product lifecycle.
2 years
Lead Product Designer
Figma • FigJam • Firebase • BigQuery • Google Sheets • Davinci Resolve • Jira • Miro • Canva • Notion • Slack
Product Strategy • UX Research • Behavioural Design • UX/UI Design • Design Systems • Growth Design • Product Analytics • Developer Collaboration
Wellness apps
Challenge
Building healthy habits isn’t simply about giving people more information.
Most users already understand what they should be doing. The challenge is maintaining those behaviours when life inevitably gets in the way.
Our goal was to understand the behavioural barriers preventing long-term engagement and design an MVP capable of supporting sustainable behaviour change rather than relying on short-term motivation alone.
Understanding User Behaviour
To understand why users struggled to stay consistent, I conducted user interviews and analysed recurring behavioural patterns across participants.
Although each person’s experience was different, clear themes consistently emerged.
Participants rarely struggled to begin healthy habits. Instead, they struggled to recover after holidays, illness, stress or simply missing a day. Accountability consistently proved more effective than reminders, while tasks felt significantly more engaging when they were personally meaningful and connected to individual goals.
This shifted our product thinking from encouraging consistency to supporting recovery after setbacks.
Using Product Analytics
Alongside qualitative research, I analysed behavioural data collected through Firebase and queried product data using BigQuery to better understand engagement patterns, task completion and user behaviour over time.
These insights complemented user interviews, allowing design decisions to be informed by both qualitative feedback and quantitative evidence.
From Design to Development
Working in an early-stage startup required close collaboration with engineering throughout implementation.
To ensure consistency and streamline development, I created detailed developer handoff documentation covering reusable UI components, typography, colour systems, spacing guidelines, accessibility considerations and implementation specifications.
This reduced ambiguity during development and made future iterations significantly easier to maintain.
This is an example of the components library, included in that handoff.
Designing the MVP
Research insights informed every stage of the product experience.
The resulting MVP centred around personalised daily tasks, social accountability, progress tracking, reflective journaling and supportive interactions designed to encourage sustainable behaviour change rather than perfect adherence.
As the product evolved, I continuously iterated user flows, interfaces and interaction patterns based on user feedback, product priorities and engineering discussions.
Reflection
Working at Budy fundamentally changed how I think about product design.
Rather than treating design as creating interfaces, I learned how valuable it is to contribute throughout the entire product lifecycle—connecting research, behavioural insights, product strategy, analytics and implementation to help teams solve the right problems.
Collaborating directly with the founder and engineering team strengthened my ability to work in fast-moving startup environments, balancing user needs, business goals and technical constraints while continuously iterating towards a better product.