Stella Lifestyle App: Providing clinical care
Creating a streamlined app experience and online menopause assessment
Role
UX/UI Designer
Industry
Healthtech, Femtech
Duration
1 month
What is the Stella App?
The Stella App is an evidence-based digital health app designed to help women manage menopause symptoms through personalised lifestyle interventions.
The app provides personalised, evidence-based care plans to help users manage symptoms and feel more in control of their health journey.
Available through partners like employers and health insurers, Stella combines lifestyle guidance, educational resources, video workouts, recipes, audio meditations, progress tracking, and access to expert coaches. With adaptable plans that evolve as symptoms change, Stella empowers users to improve sleep, mood, stress, and overall wellbeing, complementing medical treatments such as HRT.
Project overview
As Stella expanded into the US market, the business faced a new challenge: unlike in other regions, the app itself was the primary product we could offer due to regulatory considerations. While the app served as the core solution, there was also an opportunity to introduce clinical services as an added value. The key question became how best to position and integrate these services within the app experience.
Understanding the current user journeys
Since my usual focus is on web design rather than the Stella app squad, this was my first project with the team. To get started, I aimed to understand the existing user journeys within the app.
How menopausal women use the Stella app:
The Stella plan - Personalised from a user's most troublesome symptoms they flagged in the Stella menopause assessment
Coach chat - "I just wasn’t as effective and couldn’t balance different things. I now have strategies to manage symptoms and struggle to remember life before Stella. My coach has been amazing. Stella is a pocket of loveliness through the chaos of menopause.” Emma, 49
Learning more about menopause through the Learn section - “Getting out of bed was such an effort and now I feel happier. The app had such an effect on me!” Zoe, 52
Problem Statement
How might we design create a streamlined experience between the Stella app and the online menopause assessment, for app-first customers
Ideation
Since users would be starting with the app, we wouldn’t yet have information about their symptoms to create a personalised plan. To address this, I expanded the app’s design system to introduce a card component that allows users to rate their symptoms.
Using the current Stella design system, I designed a treatment card that matched the cards used on the homepage, working with the content team to explore the best copy; "talk to our clinicians about medications" felt like right to grab the attention of women looking for clinician a touchpoint.
While reviewing the iconography and section order in the Learn filter, I noticed that some icons were unclear and didn’t accurately represent their content. Additionally, the section order didn’t align with the most frequently used areas, which were treatments, symptoms, and articles.
The final solution
Reflections
• Partnering closely with research, content, and engineering teams strengthened the end-to-end journey and highlighted the value of shared ownership
• Extending the design system to address both immediate requirements and potential future edge cases sharpened my ability to think systematically
• This project deepened my understanding of how mobile app design requires a distinct mindset and problem-solving approach compared to web
