Designing an App to support women 35+ navigating hormonal changes.
YU is a women's health platform that turns Peri + Menopause support into an ongoing conversation. I led the product design end-to-end, from research and strategy to the design and development of this AI-powered platform, in collaboration with founder and women’s health expert Dr. Colleen Fogarty Draper.
Menopause is not the end of who a woman was. It is the beginning of who she is becoming.
YU, short for Your Upgrade, is built on a simple belief: women don't need to be fixed, and they don't need to start over. They need support that evolves as their bodies do, information they can trust, and guidance that recognizes their individual experience.
Founded by women’s health expert Dr. Colleen Fogarty Draper, YU combines her clinical expertise with technology to deliver guidance that feels both personal and trustworthy. My role was to design that experience, and address the challenge of keeping women engaged over time.
"Something has changed, but no one is helping me understand what it is."
For generations, menopause has lived inside a culture of silence. Symptoms begin subtly; disrupted sleep, mood shifts, brain fog, weight changes, and women navigate them without reliable answers, often dismissed by a system that reduces them to isolated symptoms.
Many women's health platforms rely on extensive data collection and ongoing tracking to deliver personalized support. While personalization can be valuable, the effort required to maintain it often becomes a burden. Users disengage before experiencing meaningful benefits, limiting the effectiveness of the support these systems are designed to provide.
If tracking is a burden busy women won't sustain. The real challenge is not collecting data once. It is remaining relevant across a multi-year, ever-shifting transition.
How do you turn one-time data collection into an ongoing relationship?
Early research, interviews and an onboarding redesign, surfaced the principles that would shape everything after:
The missing piece wasn't another tracker.
It was a conversation.
My initial solution was a dynamic dashboard featuring personalized recommendations, a tracker, and quick logging tools. But as I reviewed it, one question kept surfacing: would women realistically maintain all this tracking over time?
The research said no.
Then an exploratory survey revealed something I didn't expect. Instead of using health apps, many women were turning to Reddit and conversational AI, asking ChatGPT health-related questions in search of answers they couldn't find elsewhere.
The missing piece wasn't another tracker. It was a different interaction pattern: an ongoing conversation. So YU pivoted to feature an AI assistant as its primary interface, grounded in Dr. Colleen's curated expertise. The goal was to combine the accessibility of the conversational AI with the credibility of a trusted health expert.
An AI assistant that transforms symptoms into understanding, data into insight, and uncertainty into action.
A personalization engine builds a living profile from each woman's symptoms, goals, hormonal phase, and habits, so guidance fits her, and keeps adapting as she changes. Every conversation becomes lightweight tracking, no forms required.
Conversation connects the whole app. The chat can log symptoms to the tracker, save supplements and foods, surface trusted resources, and build a shareable health report, so insight flows straight into action across the experience.
Trust by design. The assistant is a transparent intermediary: it attributes every recommendation to Dr. Colleen and never pretends to be her. If user needs it, it also offers a direct line to reach her.
One assistant, three ways of meeting you. The engine places each woman on the Achiever–Struggler spectrum and adapts tone, pace, and depth:
Concise, action-oriented answers. Minimal friction, no preamble, built for speed and autonomy.
Warm but efficient. Acknowledges concerns, helps prioritize, and offers a few clear paths to choose from.
Empathetic and step-by-step. One issue at a time, small manageable actions, room to pause.
User testing wasn't a checkpoint, it was the engine of the design. Four rounds reshaped the product.
Testing the intake and the chat separately confused everyone, women didn't realize they were one system. I rebuilt a connected prototype so they could live the full journey. Adding a direct line to Dr. Colleen noticeably deepened their trust.
I consolidated three artifacts, intake, the chat engine, and the app, into one functional prototype. Women engaged deeply, reading recommendations and asking follow-ups. One said, "It remembers everything about me."
Women select every symptom that applies, so a simple count over-flagged them as Strugglers. I reweighted the model around severity, mood, and sleep instead of symptom count, and added a save-checklist so women control exactly what gets saved, and where.
The assistant still read like a checklist, so I rewrote prompts and guardrails to warm its tone and restructured messages for readability. I also brought back the Health Report after testing proved its worth as immediate, shareable proof of value.
The result is a AI-powered mobile platform where conversation drives engagement, an experience that adapts in real time and connects every part of the app. In testing, women engaged deeply and felt understood.
"There's a lot of information here, and I'm not overwhelmed, I'm excited and want to explore."
Designing with AI is a design discipline. Prompt design, guardrails, and curated knowledge shape the experience as much as any screen, and demand real care around safety and consistency.
Trust is the foundation. Without it women won't share; without sharing there's no personalization. Every interaction has to keep earning it.
Next Steps: a customizable notification system to extend the conversation beyond the app and keep women supported over time.