Audited the Arootah Habit Manager (desktop and mobile) for Crowdbotics, identifying UX/UI issues and proposing actionable design solutions.
I independently led a UX audit and redesign proposal for the Arootah Habit Manager app, analyzing both the desktop and mobile experiences. My role involved conducting in-depth research into competitor and adjacent habit-tracking platforms, identifying usability gaps, outdated design patterns, and areas of friction. I systematically annotated and highlighted key UX/UI issues across the app and provided targeted, actionable solutions for improvement.
To support these recommendations, I also created mid-fidelity wireframes that visualized cleaner, more intuitive flows and interfaces for tracking, scoring, and progress analytics.
The Arootah Habit Manager suffered from a bloated and unfocused dashboard, overwhelmed by excessive categories, arbitrary scoring systems, and unclear metrics. Users were left confused by the lack of structure, actionable insights, or meaningful progress tracking.
Both the mobile and desktop apps felt disjointed, with outdated aesthetics and poor usability that failed to support habit-building in a clear, engaging way.
As a consultant, my role was to identify key UX/UI issues and propose high-impact improvements. The solution focused on modernizing the app’s design, tightening its overall focus, and replacing arbitrary scoring systems with more meaningful metrics and analytics.
I recommended decluttering the dashboard, streamlining the user experience, and introducing more relevant, actionable information to support real habit formation. Mid-fidelity wireframes were created to illustrate these concepts and bring clarity to the proposed direction.
Studied leading habit-tracking tools and indirect competitors to understand common patterns, opportunities, and modern UX standards.
Conducted a full walkthrough of Arootah’s desktop and mobile platforms to identify UX/UI flaws, usability gaps, and visual inconsistencies.
Highlighted problem areas directly within the product, providing clear, contextual notes on usability breakdowns and design shortcomings.
Developed mid-fidelity wireframes focused on simplifying flows, modernizing visuals, and improving clarity for key features and screens.
Provided actionable insights and solution concepts to tighten focus, enhance usability, and align the product with user goals.
To ground my recommendations in current best practices, I conducted an in-depth analysis of both direct competitors and design-forward inspirations in the habit-tracking space. I reviewed each competitor’s approach to onboarding, habit creation, scoring systems, analytics, and overall UI/UX flow. This helped me identify common patterns, standout features, and opportunities for Arootah to improve usability and clarity.
These sources helped me stay informed on modern visual design trends and interaction patterns, ensuring my solutions were both strategically sound and aesthetically relevant.
To begin the audit, I downloaded the Arootah Habit Manager mobile app and accessed the desktop platform to experience the product firsthand from a user’s perspective. I completed a full walkthrough of both platforms — exploring habit creation, tracking, scoring systems, calendars, notes, analytics, and the overall dashboard experience.
This hands-on approach allowed me to uncover usability issues, friction points, visual inconsistencies, and areas where the product lacked clarity or user guidance. I evaluated not just the interface design, but also the structure and logic behind key flows, noting where features felt disjointed, outdated, or unintuitive.
This foundational step ensured that every recommendation I made was grounded in real usage, not just surface-level observation.
The desktop version of the Arootah Habit Manager felt overwhelming, visually cluttered, and lacked a clear user flow. Instead of guiding users toward meaningful habit tracking and reflection, the dashboard bombarded them with tabs, scores, and percentages — many of which lacked explanation or context.
The overall structure prioritized quantity over clarity, making it difficult to understand progress or stay motivated.Below is a breakdown of the key UX and UI issues identified during the audit:
The dashboard presents too many categories, regardless of the user's selected habits. It feels like the app is trying to do everything at once instead of focusing on its core purpose.
For example, having both “Health” and “Partner” as default categories raises questions about the app’s primary intent.
The dashboard suffers from a dated visual design and poor UI choices.
Low-resolution icons, excessive background colors, inconsistent typography, and harsh drop shadows contribute to a cluttered and unpolished interface.
Key elements like tabs and buttons lack visual hierarchy, making them harder to find and scan.
The 1–10 scoring system lacks clarity and fails to provide meaningful insights.
Users don’t know what the numbers represent — for example, rating sleep quality instead of inputting actual hours creates ambiguity.
The app calculates percentage scores based on these ratings, but the logic is unexplained. Combined with vague analytics and an unreadable pie chart, the system feels more like a note-taking tool than a true habit tracker.
The habit setup flow includes too many required fields — such as cues, purpose, and keystone habits — that add complexity without clear payoff.
Once completed, users don’t see or interact with these inputs again, making them feel unnecessary and disconnected from the core experience.
The Arootah mobile app presents several usability challenges that hinder habit tracking on the go. While the core functionality mirrors the desktop experience, the mobile interface suffers from unintuitive interactions, navigation friction, and outdated design patterns.
These issues collectively reduce the app’s effectiveness as a daily tool, making it harder for users to quickly log habits, view progress, or stay engaged.
The mobile app requires users to press, hold, and slide to select a score, rather than simply tapping a number. This interaction is unintuitive and inconsistent with common mobile UX patterns.
The mobile app’s calendar navigation is inefficient—users must scroll week by week with no option to jump between months or years. Returning to today’s date requires manual scrolling or refreshing, which breaks common UX patterns.
On top of that, the layout feels cluttered. “Today’s Progress” and the notification icon are too close, there’s no standard hamburger menu, and the progress bar looks clickable but isn’t. These issues make the app harder to navigate and reduce engagement.
The app’s color scheme and typography feel dated, lacking the clean, modern aesthetic users expect from productivity tools. The visual design doesn’t align with current UI trends, which can make the interface feel less professional and harder to trust.
When adding a note, the category dropdown shows all possible categories—even ones the user hasn’t selected or used. This forces users to scroll through irrelevant options just to find the right one, adding unnecessary friction to a simple task.
The habit description field is a collapsible dropdown that opens the keyboard when tapped, but the text field itself gets covered, forcing users to scroll just to see what they’re typing. This creates a clunky and frustrating input experience during habit creation.
The app requires users to rate habits like a grocery budget goal ($150/week) on a 1–10 scale, instead of allowing structured data input like actual dollar amounts. The only workaround is free-text notes, which makes the app feel more like a journal than a true habit tracker, with little value in terms of insights or progress tracking.
After identifying core UX and UI issues across both the mobile and desktop experiences, I categorized them into quick wins and long-term solutions.
These recommendations focus on improving usability, engagement, and clarity, prioritizing changes that deliver the most impact with the least effort, while also outlining strategic enhancements that require more investment.
While I addressed both desktop and mobile experiences, I prioritized the mobile app for several reasons. Habit-tracking apps are primarily used on mobile devices—this is where daily interactions happen. According to StatCounter, as of January 2025, mobile devices account for 63.92% of global web traffic, compared to 36.08% for desktop. This reflects a broader industry trend toward mobile-first behavior, especially in the wellness and productivity space.
Additionally, the most critical usability issues—calendar navigation, scoring interaction, note-taking friction, and UI layout—exist in the mobile experience. Addressing these issues first ensures better retention, engagement, and long-term habit adoption for the majority of users.
This project was approached as a UX consulting engagement aimed at evaluating and improving the Arootah Habit Manager app across mobile and desktop platforms. The primary goal was to identify key usability issues and propose solutions that enhance user engagement, streamline workflows, and modernize the overall experience.
As is often the case in early-stage consulting work, this evaluation was conducted without direct access to internal research, user data, or stakeholder interviews. In response, I applied established UX heuristics, competitive benchmarking, and product strategy best practices to guide design decisions. The result is a set of actionable, user-centered recommendations that balance usability, simplicity, and scalability.
To move these concepts into production, I recommend the following approach:
