Problem
Psoriasis is lifelong, incurable, and highly visible. While treatment works, it depends on 12+ weeks of consistency, something most patients struggle with. Across 16 interviews, we found existing apps were used only during flare-ups, not as sustained care.
Solution
Daily Bloom is the companion app for Dr. Reddy's UV-B therapy device, but really, it's a behaviour-change product disguised as a health tracker. We collapsed five fragmented tools into one daily 3-minute ritual. The hardware handles dosage; the app handles the harder part, making patients want to come back tomorrow.
Collaborators
Pranay Kotadia (UX and UI Efforts)
Atharva Telang (UI Efforts)
Duration
8 Months
THE SHINY HIGHLIGHTS
Dr. Reddy’s launched Daily Bloom alongside a portable UV-B device to simplify psoriasis care. But designing for psoriasis meant solving a harder problem: why do patients abandon treatment despite the cost of stopping? That question shaped the next 8 months.
Given that psoriasis has no cure, our primary goal was to focus on its management, helping patients navigate their condition more effectively and improve their quality of life.
Interviews with 16 psoriasis patients revealed that the hardest part wasn’t just managing symptoms, it was managing stigma, judgment, and the emotional toll of daily life. These insights became the foundation for the product.
After all the interview three personas were formed. I needed them to actually steer design trade-offs. After affinity-mapping the interview data, three patterns emerged that genuinely behaved differently in the app.
Ashish 28
Energetic, fitness conscious, social
Struggles to balance an active lifestyle with flare-ups, conscious of appearance, finds strict routines frustrating
Flexible care strategies, motivational tracking, community support
Seema 36
Busy professional, caregiver, family woman
No time for frequent appointments, stress-induced flare-ups, hesitant to change diet
Simple guided routines, stress-management techniques, meal planning help
Ravi 56
Reserved, practical, stability over change
Feels psoriasis is a lifelong struggle, skeptical about new treatments, avoids socialising in events
Personalized coaching, discreet solutions, empathetic community engagement
the three personas
Most psoriasis apps copy each other. They all have a tracker, a calendar, a doctor-finder. None of them feel good to use. So I broadened the lens and audited competitors across three categories, not just direct competitors, but anyone solving adjacent problems well:
Competitive Benchmarking
Onboarding sounds simple until you remember Daily Bloom is both a hardware purchase and a clinical relationship. The journey had to work for two purchase flows (online direct-to-patient, and offline via dermatologists) and three handoff points (marketing → device unboxing → app first-launch).
I mapped both flows end-to-end to surface the real tensions:
A customer journey map was created with Dr. Reddy's medical team, outlining key touchpoints across the 12-week program with the UV device, experts, psychologists, and the CR Manager.
Scroll Sideways
Most health apps organise around clinical categories (Symptoms, Treatment, Settings). I organised around what patients are actually doing when they open the app : which, after 16 interviews, came down to five distinct jobs:
Home → "Where am I in my care plan today?"
UV Sessions → "Run my therapy session safely"
Diet → "What can I eat that won't trigger a flare?"
Wellness → "Help me deal with how this feels"
Chat → "Talk to someone who knows my case"
III] Desiging The Interface
Translating user needs into screens, systems, and journeys.
Most onboarding flows treat branding as surface-level. We did the opposite: I worked with our UI designer to build the brand language from the physical realities of psoriasis itself.
Three key decisions shaped it:
The skin bump became the brand mark.
Inspired by raised psoriasis plaques, the motif appears on the splash screen and gradually flattens through onboarding, a metaphor for small, visible progress over time.Skin-scale textures became the background pattern.
Subtle but tactile, it grounded the product in the lived reality of the condition and made the brand feel deeply familiar.Onboarding ends with a personalised Skin Health Index, not a feature tour.
Instead of explaining the app, we gave users a baseline score, creating an immediate reason to return and track progress.
Ashish 28
Energetic, fitness conscious, social
The Resilient Go-Getter
Struggles to balance an active lifestyle with flare-ups, conscious of appearance, finds strict routines frustrating
Flexible care strategies, motivational tracking, community support
Seema 36
Busy professional, caregiver, family woman
The Overwhelmed Multitasker
No time for frequent appointments, stress-induced flare-ups, hesitant to change diet
Simple guided routines, stress-management techniques, meal planning help
Ashish 28
Reserved, practical, stability over change
The Experinced Warrior
Feels psoriasis is a lifelong struggle, skeptical about new treatments, avoids socialising in events
Personalized coaching, discreet solutions, empathetic community engagement
Key takeaways from the Interviews
Visual UI Concept
Onboarding User flow
The home screen is the busiest piece of real estate in any app. For Daily Bloom, I needed it to do three jobs at once: surface the next UV session, prompt today's meal log, and keep the wellness/mental-health thread alive. The card-based layout made each persona's "first action" visible and one-tap accessible:
UV Sessions Card → Ashish (Resilient Go-Getter): tomorrow's session at a glance + Photo Journal access
Diet Plan Card → Seema (Overwhelmed Multitasker): pre-built meal recs + Diet Challenges hook
Wellness Card → Ravi (Experienced Warrior): low-effort mood log + Coach connection
Ashish 28
Energetic, fitness conscious, social
The Resilient Go-Getter
Struggles to balance an active lifestyle with flare-ups, conscious of appearance, finds strict routines frustrating
Flexible care strategies, motivational tracking, community support
Seema 36
Busy professional, caregiver, family woman
The Overwhelmed Multitasker
No time for frequent appointments, stress-induced flare-ups, hesitant to change diet
Simple guided routines, stress-management techniques, meal planning help
Ashish 28
Reserved, practical, stability over change
The Experinced Warrior
Feels psoriasis is a lifelong struggle, skeptical about new treatments, avoids socialising in events
Personalized coaching, discreet solutions, empathetic community engagement
Key takeaways from the Interviews
Home Screen card designs
Home Screen
Happy paths are easy. The work is everywhere else. For the UV widget alone, the home screen had to handle four distinct states gracefully:
State 1 → What happens when a user opens the app for the first time? Should there be an introductory onboarding to guide them on using the UV device?
State 2 → What happens when the user is already familiar with app? Do they see a reminder of their next UV session right on the widget?
State 3 → What if the user hasn’t taken the required psoriasis test yet? Should the widget then direct them to complete the test?
State 4 → What if there’s a redness report? Should we alert the user that their UV session has been paused for safety?
This was the app’s highest-stakes feature: balancing safe UV-B treatment with patient compliance. I simplified device pairing with clear fallback flows, turned complex dosage into an intuitive body-map interface, and added a photo journal to track progress and reduce anxiety between dermatologist visits.
UV User Flow
"I just want to eat what I like, but balancing health and tasty food is so hard."
That was the first thing one of our 16 patients said in research. It was also the moment I knew diet wouldn't be a calorie tracker.
We built three layers, each addressing a specific patient need:
Regionally relevant recipes
Built a recipe library tailored to Indian diets, validated by clinical nutrition experts.Fast meal logging
Designed a 15-second logging flow with simple meal selection and portion confirmation.Flexible diet challenges
Created streak-based challenges that encouraged consistency without punishing missed days, designed for the unpredictability of chronic care.
Calendar Widget with portion sizes
Adding a meal interaction
Diet Challenge Flow
Wellness was the most debated feature, but patient research made its importance clear: mental health wasn’t separate from psoriasis, it was part of living with it.
I pushed for a lean, focused solution, 4-tap mood logging, contextual check-ins (“what were you doing?” and “where?”) to surface emotional patterns, and coach-reviewed exercises instead of generic content.
IV] Testing the waters
Where my favourite design decisions got their hardest reality check.
I served as moderator. Atharva took observation notes. Tasks were specific (11 in total), participants were diverse (4M / 2F, age 29+, recruited from Mumbai, Delhi, and Pune), and the methodology was qualitative usability testing on Zoom.
Concept Validation → Test the overall product concept with the target audience.
Friction Analysis → Uncover issues, friction points and potential drop offs.
Design Evaluation → Evaluate the overall visual design to observe reactions to look and feel.
Improvement Opportunities → Discover area of opportunities for improvement.
350+ observations synthesized in Miro, bucketed into 20 sections by severity, generating 50+ insights and 10 change recommendations that shipped before launch.
Six patients won't validate everything, but they reliably tell you what's broken.
Across 11 tasks, findings clustered into seven areas of the app: onboarding, the psoriasis test and health coach flow, wellness, home, report flare-up, UV therapy, and profile.
Alongside the qualitative findings, I captured usability metrics: ease of use, look and feel, likelihood to recommend, and willingness to pay for the UV device and care plan.
User Rating
Price willing to pay for UV Device & Care Plan
Usability testing metrics
Eight recommendations came out of testing, spanning legibility, language, accessibility, and new flows. The before/after below shows a few of them at work.
Recommendations
V] Impact in motion
Where the design meets reality, and what we're measuring as it does.
Ashish 28
Energetic, fitness conscious, social
The Resilient Go-Getter
Struggles to balance an active lifestyle with flare-ups, conscious of appearance, finds strict routines frustrating
Flexible care strategies, motivational tracking, community support
Seema 36
Busy professional, caregiver, family woman
The Overwhelmed Multitasker
No time for frequent appointments, stress-induced flare-ups, hesitant to change diet
Simple guided routines, stress-management techniques, meal planning help
Ashish 28
Reserved, practical, stability over change
The Experinced Warrior
Feels psoriasis is a lifelong struggle, skeptical about new treatments, avoids socialising in events
Personalized coaching, discreet solutions, empathetic community engagement
Key takeaways from the Interviews
