Women's Health Community

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Women's Health Community

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Women's Health Community

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—— Overview

Roar is a community-driven women's health platform designed to give women a trusted, personalized space to connect, share experiences, and build their own health journey, starting with menopause. It grew out of a real gap: when one of our co-founders went through menopause, there was nowhere to go for honest, peer-grounded information. Doctors gave clinical answers. Friends gave conflicting opinions. The internet gave anxiety. Roar was the platform she wished had existed.

Client

roar / passion project

Date

August 14, 2023

Role

Co-Designer and UX Strategist

Service

UX Strategy, Product Design, UI Design

Contribution

Responsible for product vision sessions, experience strategy, onboarding flow design, Circles architecture, UI design across web and mobile surfaces, and AI intake companion prototype (2025 extension)

—— Brief

Women going through menopause have no trusted, peer-led space to find community, make sense of conflicting information, and build a health journey that actually reflects how they live.

Menopause affects roughly half the global population yet remains one of the most underserved areas of women's health. Women navigating it are caught between clinical language that doesn't translate to lived experience and informal advice that lacks credibility. Meanwhile, the products and platforms built for them tend to either medicalize the experience or dress it up in lifestyle aesthetics. Neither actually helps a woman figure out what is happening to her body, what to call it, or who else is going through the same thing. Roar was designed to close that gap.

15

Friends and family interviewed

45

test users on PoC launch day

89

women signed up for the mailing list in the first month

—— CHALLENGE

The core tension was trust. Women in this space have been burned before by wellness apps that commodify vulnerability, by social platforms that algorithmically bury nuanced health conversations, and by a broader culture that treats menopause as something to whisper about. Any platform trying to serve this community would need to earn trust before it asked for anything. Layered on top of that: the audience spans a wide age range with varying levels of tech fluency. Many of these women don't yet have the vocabulary for what they're experiencing. They don't know if what they're feeling is perimenopause or something else entirely. They don't know what questions to ask their doctor, let alone what to search for in a new app. The design couldn't just be intuitive. It had to be orienting. And the content problem was real. A community app is only as valuable as the conversations happening inside it. Getting women to their first meaningful connection before they bounced was the design challenge underneath every other design challenge.

—— solution

Three things anchored the design direction.

01

A personalized onboarding flow that did real intake work

Rather than a generic sign-up sequence, we designed an onboarding flow that asked women meaningful questions about their stage, symptoms, preferences, and approach, whether they were on hormone replacement therapy, taking a holistic path, or still figuring it out. The app used those answers to shape their experience from the first screen: the Circles they were shown, the resources surfaced, the community they were placed into, allowing them to feel welcome and bypass any tech resistance from the very beginning. We wanted to teach the community early how to use the space, allowing them to truly integrate and feel welcomed by key personalization.

02

Circles instead of groups

The obvious pattern was the Facebook Group model. We rejected it. A Circle is something you join because it reflects where you are right now, whether that's hot flashes, HRT, perimenopause, holistic approaches, or sleep. It's topic-first and identity-affirming rather than social-graph-first. Each Circle has its own feed, its own community guidelines, and its own keyword taxonomy, giving members real signal without noise. The name itself does quiet UX work: a circle has no head of the table.

03

A content ecosystem built around education, not just conversation

The newsfeed wasn't just peer posts. It was designed to be a legitimate learning environment, layering in curated articles, embedded definitions, polls, and events hosted by doctors and specialists who could speak to what women were actually experiencing. Every piece of content was source-attributed so women could evaluate where information was coming from and make informed decisions about what to trust. The goal was to make education feel like part of the community rather than a separate destination you had to go find.

—— 4 key design decisions

1/ Circles over groups
Early on we had to decide how to structure community within the app. The Facebook Group model was the obvious reference point, but it carries baggage. It feels public, performative, and algorithm-driven in ways that actively work against vulnerability. We landed on Circles. The distinction is intentional: a Circle is intimate, self-selected, and topic-anchored. Each has its own guidelines and keyword filters so members could navigate conversations around specific symptoms or treatment approaches without wading through noise. The name itself matters. A circle implies equal standing, no hierarchy, no algorithm deciding who gets heard.
2/ Onboarding as the first act of personalization and seamless tech barrier-to-entry
Most community apps treat onboarding as a necessary friction before you get to the real product. We treated it as the product's first meaningful moment. The flow we designed asked substantive questions: what stage are you in, what symptoms are most present, what is your approach to treatment, what are you hoping to find here. Those answers didn't just populate a profile. They shaped everything the woman saw next. Getting this right required balancing depth with momentum. Too many questions and women would drop off. Too few and the personalization wouldn't hold. We iterated on the flow length and question framing considerably before landing on a sequence that felt like a conversation rather than a form.
3/ Definitions in the feed
One of the subtler decisions was building a definitions content type directly into the newsfeed. Women in this community were regularly encountering terms they didn't recognize: perimenopause, HRT, bioidentical hormones, vasomotor symptoms. Rather than routing them to a separate glossary or out to Google, we embedded contextual definitions inline. It kept women inside the experience and reinforced Roar's role as a place that meets you where you are, vocabulary and all.
4/ The AI intake companion (2025 extension)
When I returned to this project in 2025, AI had become central to how the best products onboard and orient new users. Looking back at Roar, the problem we were always trying to solve in onboarding was fundamentally an AI problem: how do you help someone who doesn't know what they don't know get oriented fast, in language that feels human rather than clinical? The original onboarding flow used a structured form to gather intake information. It worked, but it asked women to already have some self-knowledge about their stage and symptoms before they could answer meaningfully. Many didn't. That's the gap. I prototyped an AI-powered intake companion to replace that cold form with a warm conversation. Instead of checkboxes and dropdowns, a woman arrives and is greeted by a brief conversational exchange that listens, reflects back what it's hearing, and uses that to orient her within the platform, surfacing the Circles most relevant to her experience and the vocabulary to help her start making sense of what she's going through. This isn't AI as a feature. It's AI as the bridge between not knowing where to start and feeling like you belong somewhere. For women in their 40s and 50s who may be coming to digital health tools with skepticism, that distinction matters. The companion is designed to feel like a knowledgeable friend. It meets them before the product does.

—— PROCESS

Late 2022 / Early 2023
Founder Sarah identified the gap from lived experience. Early vision sessions with the three of us shaped the core concept: community first, education woven in, personalization from the start.
2023
My close friend and I led UX and UI design across the full product surface, including branding and visual design to build the story. We designed the onboarding flow, Circles architecture, newsfeed with multiple content types, Resources section, Events, Search, saved posts, notifications, profile, and a Marketplace concept. The visual language we landed on was editorial and warm: a bold serif wordmark, clean black and white structure, generous white space, and real photography that treated women as full people rather than patients.
2025
With AI prototyping now central to my practice, I returned to Roar and built the AI intake companion prototype in Lovable, extending the original vision into territory that had become newly possible.
2026
With AI prototyping now central to my practice, I returned to Roar and built the AI intake companion prototype in Lovable, extending the original vision into territory that had become newly possible.

The Override

The easiest version of this product was a content platform with a community tab bolted on. We kept pushing against that because we knew the emotional stakes were different here. Women coming to Roar weren't just looking for information. They were looking for recognition, the feeling that what they were going through was real, that other women had been there, and that someone had thought carefully about how to hold that experience. That meant making calls that weren't obvious from the data. Naming the spaces Circles instead of Groups. Putting definitions in the feed instead of a separate glossary. Designing an onboarding flow that asked real questions and used the answers for something. And eventually, recognizing that a conversational AI companion could do what a form never fully could: make a woman feel heard before she'd even joined a single Circle. That's the kind of judgment AI doesn't make. It has to come from designers who understand what's actually at stake for the people they're building for.