DailyOM
Design direction for a twenty-year-old wellness brand's move to mobile.
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DailyOM has guided personal growth online since 2004. It has 3.5 million subscribers and 375+ courses from 250+ instructors, covering everything from emotional health to spirituality. In 2025 I led design direction for its redesigned iOS and Android apps. The work was translating the newly relaunched website into two native mobile experiences and introducing DailyOM Plus, a monthly subscription to the full course library. -
Design Director. I own the direction, the mobile visual system, and the subscription experience. Product: Taylor Smyrnos. Design: Adam Moss, Android. Brand partner: Todd Zander, Product Director at DailyOM. Engineering: the Everyday Health team.
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Shipped the MVP on iOS and Android. It puts 240+ courses in one native library, with personalized recommendations, bookmarks, and progress tracking.
The Challenge
Two teams, one app, and no shared playbook.
DailyOM is a web company with no mobile engineering team, so the app was built by ours. That meant two teams working on different schedules, in different time zones, with different processes and different paces, all trying to ship one product. On top of that, the platform hosting DailyOM's courses came with technical constraints the app had to design around.
So a big part of the job was keeping everyone in sync. Our PMs and designers became the bridge: regular updates, shared documentation, and decisions written down so they didn't have to be made twice. When the course platform limited what we could build, we designed with those limits instead of fighting them.
Most of the hard work on this project happened between the teams, not on the screens.
The Design Pillars
Unmistakably DailyOM
The app had to feel like the newly relaunched website from the first screen. It uses the same warm backgrounds, course cards and imagery, with the brand palette adapted for mobile.
Native on both phones
The app follows Apple's HIG on iOS and Material 3 on Android, with SF Pro and Roboto, and supports light and dark mode. The brand sets the look, and each platform sets the structure.
Made for longtime members
Web purchases carry over into the app. Onboarding asks what you want to grow in. The paywall appears only when you open a lesson, which is when you're most ready to commit.
Overview
Before designing a single screen, we got to know two things: the person we were designing for, and the brand she already trusts.
First stop, the persona. DailyOM’s existing research gave us Suzanne. She’s 51, an HR director with grown kids, and she’s moving from caregiving to self-care. She already buys courses on the web and wants a deeper, everyday connection on her phone. Everything in the MVP was built for her.
Then, the brand itself. DailyOM is a holistic wellness brand, a place for mind, body and spirit rather than a single practice. Its 375+ courses run from fitness and body self-care to emotional health, relationships, and spiritual and metaphysical topics. The voice is nurturing and trusted, closer to a mentor than a fitness coach, and that’s why members stay for years.
We went through the newly relaunched website piece by piece: colors, typography and components. For each one, we decided what carries over to the app and what hands off to the platform.
Project 01 — Brand & Persona.
Tradeoff
Quincy is the most recognizable piece of DailyOM’s look, and we left it on the website. Custom fonts in a native app add load time, take extra work to scale with system text sizes, and never feel quite native on iOS or Android. Readability was the priority, especially for an audience aged 45 to 65, so the app uses SF Pro and Roboto and lets color, imagery and the course cards carry the brand instead. It still feels like DailyOM. It just reads like a phone.
The Result
Not measured in new users. Measured in Apple coming back.
The reskin didn't move a download chart, and it wasn't meant to. It went into something harder to win: our relationship with Apple. We asked to modernize, we shipped it on Apple's own design language, and the collaboration is still going. It also went to the people on the other side of the screen. Every challenge is someone on a health journey, and a team trying to beat another team. An app that looks like it belongs on their phone takes both seriously: the goal, and the competitive spirit that gets them to close their rings one more day. That's what we reskinned it for.
Project 02 — Mindful challenge with Apple.
Overview
Once a year Apple runs its Eat Well challenge on Challenges, one of the two global employee challenges it contracts us for, and it's our main design collaboration with them. The mechanic is simple: form a team, compete, and log two things every day. What you ate, in servings of fruit and vegetables, and how you felt about it. It's mindful consumption in its most practical form, the same idea underneath Lose It!, our sister brand: notice what you eat, and the rest gets easier.
Three screens collect the emotions, one for each skill: Sense your hunger before you eat, Savor while you eat, and note your Satisfaction after. Each one is a single tap on an emoji, with a short reflection underneath. A mini onboarding teaches the rules before the first check-in.
Tradeoff
Working with an outside team is always the hard part: getting feedback on the designs in time, and setting expectations on both sides about what's possible. On this one the constraint was engineering. We had limited engineering resources, so the design had to do more with less: reuse the check-in pattern three times instead of building three different screens, and keep the onboarding to three.
The Result
Apple keeps coming back, and wants more.
In 2026 the Eat Well challenge drew a major share of Apple's employee base, from executives to retail stores, all logging what they ate and how they felt about it for a month. Apple has renewed its challenges with us for more than ten years, and it wants to keep going. That's the number I care about most: a company that holds everything to its own standard chose, again, to run its people's wellbeing through our app. The next one is already in design.
Project 03 — Apple Watch.
Overview
Apple Watch is one of Apple's flagship products and the center of the Close Your Rings Challenge, and our watchOS experience was overdue for attention. Alongside the phone, we rebooted the Mindful check-in on the wrist and fixed the Watch app for Liquid Glass: one color per metric, one big number per screen, and a single tap from the glance to the action. In Apple's 2026 survey, the Watch complication was the single most-used feature of the challenge, cited by about 65% of respondents.
Tradeoff
There was almost no documentation on taking a Watch app to Liquid Glass. Apple's guidance was written for the phone, so we had to find out for ourselves how the material behaves on a small, round-cornered screen. Every hour spent investigating was an hour not spent fixing. We traded some polish on the edges for a clear answer on the core screens, and shipped those right.
The Result
One product, on two screens.
The Watch and the phone finally look and behave like the same app. People can use the Watch as a second challenge tracker: glance at their points, log a fruit or a mindful check-in, nudge their team, without reaching for the phone. The challenge now lives where the rings do.
Project 04 — Apple Rings 10-year anniversary.
Overview
In 2025 Apple celebrated ten years of the Activity rings, and we built a special challenge with them to mark it. Branding was the feature. We started where we always start, with Apple's own assets: the Global Close Your Rings Day award, the Close Your Rings page, the rings as light. Then we added the one thing an anniversary needs, a metal. Gold framed the 10 mark, the challenge card on Home, the intro page and every button, and we explored it many ways before landing on the final.
Tradeoff
For once, there wasn't one. We had the time and no hard constraints, so the tradeoff we usually make, speed against polish, didn't apply. We spent that freedom on exploration: more versions of the gold than any other challenge got.
Met with enthusiasm inside Apple.
The anniversary challenge landed the way we hoped: Apple's own people, the ones who closed those rings for ten years, were excited to join it. A celebration of their product that felt like theirs.
The Result
What this project led to
It got me moving.
Four years of designing the app that gets Apple's people to close their rings changed how I move, too. I started doing more fitness and more sports, and I got competitive.
It also brought me people. Marilyn, who I met at Zumba at the YMCA, forever inspires me: she shows up, she moves, and she smiles through every class. Friendships like hers are the part no leaderboard measures.