Case Study — 001
PULSE The Heartbeat of Progress.
The Problem
Nobody built a timer for the person who trains at 6am and deep-works at 9am.
Built-in timers do one thing. Fitness apps are cluttered and single-use. Pomodoro apps ignore the wrist. The person who treats both fitness and productivity as a unified discipline had no tool built specifically for them.
The gap wasn’t a missing feature. It was a missing audience. Users were patching together three different apps and losing flow every time they switched contexts.
The Audience
Three personas. One underlying need.
Before touching the product, I mapped three user types who, despite different schedules, shared the same need: frictionless movement through their day.
The crossover between fitness and productivity wasn’t a compromise. It was the product. Someone who tracks intervals at 6am and runs focus blocks at 9am is the same person. Pulse was built for that specific life.
The Athlete
Loses rhythm between sets. Needs tactical, wrist-based feedback that keeps them in flow without breaking focus.
The Professional
Early-career. Needs rigid structure to protect deep-work blocks from distraction and context switching.
The Optimizer
Builds routines like a business. Lives at the intersection of data, discipline, and intentional daily design.
“Pulse was the first idea. It stuck because it was already right — alive, rhythmic, lives on the wrist. It didn’t need to explain itself.”
The Design
Feel alive but not loud. Intentional but not sterile.
Every decision traced back to one brief. The watch is the main character. The phone follows. One graphic metaphor per screen — a glow, a ring, or a card — never all three.
The phone follows the wrist. Interactions set at 60 BPM — the rhythm of a breath. Every screen designed to work at a glance.
Color only appears on active UI elements. It guides without decorating. When the timer starts, you feel it.
Phase changes bring a radial glow shift. Completion is a soft pulse, not a celebration. Every animation has a purpose.
Vertical cards, color-coded, drag to reorder. Build a sequence once, run it every day. Name it and it becomes part of your vocabulary.
Midnight black, deep teal panels, warm sandstone accents. Premium without noise. Holds up on a watch face and a pitch deck.
What Stopped It
The team. Not the product.
Our developer got pulled by life. The third member was never fully bought in. When the people building something aren’t aligned on why it matters, the work stalls regardless of how strong the concept is.
The pitch plan was built. The personas were defined. The design system was complete. What we didn’t solve for early enough was team conviction.
What I’d do differently: Validate buy-in before writing a single brief. A landing page and waitlist would have told us whether the audience was real — and whether the team had the commitment to see it through.
My Contribution
What I own.
Pulse is on hold. The thinking behind it isn’t.