Overview

Tangerine is a thoughtfully designed mobile app that helps users improve their daily well-being through habit tracking, mood journaling, and emotional reflection. It’s more than a productivity tool, it’s a self-care companion built to encourage small, meaningful steps toward a better life.

The goal from the beginning was clear: to create an experience that feels warm, motivating, and non-judgmental, where self-discipline meets self-kindness.

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Our Role

We led the full development process across mobile platforms, helping bring Tangerine from concept to polished product. Our work focused on:

Designing habit formation flows that reinforce consistency

Developing mood tracking features with emotional depth

Creating a smooth journaling experience with optional daily prompts

Integrating analytics to provide users with meaningful progress insights

Ensuring seamless performance across iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch

Key Challenges and How We Solved Them

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Creating emotional safety in a tracking tool

Challenge: Many users approach self-care apps with feelings of guilt or pressure. Our goal was to encourage reflection, not perfection.
Solution: We used gentle visual design, celebratory microinteractions, and soft language to create an emotionally safe space that motivates without shaming.

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Avoiding feature overload

Challenge: With multiple tools inside one app, habits, moods, journaling, insights, the experience had to remain lightweight and approachable.
Solution: We built a layered interface where users only see what they need when they need it, with minimal friction between sections.

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Building consistency without rigidity

Challenge: Users needed to track progress without feeling boxed in by rigid systems.
Solution: We allowed for flexible scheduling, optional reminders, and easy habit customization, adapting the experience to the user’s lifestyle, not the other way around.

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Maintaining performance and sync integrity

Challenge: Smooth syncing across devices and real-time habit updates were crucial.
Solution: We implemented a background sync engine and offline-first caching to ensure a fast, reliable experience at all times.

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Results and Impact

Became a go-to self-care app for thousands of users, praised for its calming interface and positive impact on daily wellness routines

Consistently rated above 4.7 by a large and loyal user base

Featured by Apple for design and functionality

High retention among users focused on long-term habit formation

Frequently described by users as “motivating without pressure,” “a peaceful part of my day,” and “the only habit tracker I’ve actually stuck with”

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Why This Project Matters

Tangerine is a perfect example of how strong product thinking and thoughtful design can come together to improve real lives. It blends structure with compassion, proving that wellness tools can be both technically strong and emotionally intelligent.

For us, it reinforced the importance of empathy in design, scalability in development, and the power of simplicity when done right.

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