Flow Care

Project Year

2025

App Site

Uganda Flow Care

Client

Okello Augustine Kezzy-Founder

Industry

NGO

Project Year

2025

App Site

Uganda Flow Care

Client

HoneOkello Augustine Kezzy-Founder

Industry

NGO Uganda Africa

My Role

FlowCare is a mobile wellness app designed for teenage girls living in rural Ugandan communities, created in collaboration with the NGO Plavio. The goal is to offer a culturally respectful, easy-to-use way to track menstrual cycles, promote hygiene, and support girls with clear, encouraging education.

As the UX/UI and graphic designer on this project, I worked closely with the NGO’s founder to align the product vision with real community needs, while shaping both the visual identity and the interface design. This case study walks through the research, personas, and design decisions that shaped FlowCare into a compassionate, practical digital companion for its users.

Visual Identity & Branding

The visual identity for FlowCare is built to feel warm, trustworthy, and approachable for teenage girls who may be new to both smartphones and menstrual health education. Soft, uplifting colors and rounded shapes were chosen to reduce anxiety, signal safety, and move away from the clinical or stigmatizing visuals often associated with this topic.
​
Illustrations and iconography focus on relatable daily moments rather than medical imagery, helping users see themselves in the product and feel supported rather than judged. Typography and layout were kept clean and legible to work well on smaller, lower-end devices while maintaining a friendly, optimistic tone throughout the experience.

Color Palette

To support the branding, I created a custom color system using shades of pink, purple, earth tones, and soft neutrals. These colors evoke safety, warmth, and confidence—key emotional anchors for the app’s young user base.

  • Pinks were used to symbolize softness and care.
  • Purples convey strength, richness, and femininity.
  • Pastel shades give the UI a non-intimidating, welcoming feel, especially for first-time users.

This palette was applied consistently across the app, including icons, backgrounds, cards, and buttons, ensuring brand cohesiveness and user trust.

 

Visual Identity & Branding

The visual identity for FlowCare is built to feel warm, trustworthy, and approachable for teenage girls who may be new to both smartphones and menstrual health education. Soft, uplifting colors and rounded shapes were chosen to reduce anxiety, signal safety, and move away from the clinical or stigmatizing visuals often associated with this topic.
​
Illustrations and iconography focus on relatable daily moments rather than medical imagery, helping users see themselves in the product and feel supported rather than judged. Typography and layout were kept clean and legible to work well on smaller, lower-end devices while maintaining a friendly, optimistic tone throughout the experience.

Color Palette

To support the branding, I created a custom color system using shades of pink, purple, earth tones, and soft neutrals. These colors evoke safety, warmth, and confidence—key emotional anchors for the app’s young user base.

  • Pinks were used to symbolize softness and care.
  • Purples convey strength, richness, and femininity.
  • Pastel shades give the UI a non-intimidating, welcoming feel, especially for first-time users.

This palette was applied consistently across the app, including icons, backgrounds, cards, and buttons, ensuring brand cohesiveness and user trust.

The Challenge

Designing for Limited Digital Access & Health Literacy

Designing FlowCare was not only a design brief but a socially driven challenge that required empathy, cultural sensitivity, and practical constraints in mind. As a menstrual health app for girls in rural and underserved Ugandan communities, the product needed to address limited connectivity, low health literacy, emotional stigma, and first-time smartphone use all at once.

Limited Digital Access

Many potential users rely on shared, low-end smartphones with unstable internet and very limited data. FlowCare therefore needed to be lightweight, data-efficient, and usable in low-connectivity contexts, with key content structured so it could be accessed even when the connection is poor or intermittent.

Low Health Literacy&Menstrual Stigma

Menstruation is still a taboo topic in many communities, and formal reproductive education can be scarce. Content had to use plain, respectful language and supportive visuals so that complex concepts became easy to understand and emotionally safe to explore.

Emotional Safety&Trust

For many girls, FlowCare might be the first private, non-judgmental space where they can learn about their bodies. The tone of voice, illustrations, and interaction patterns were all designed to feel warm, encouraging, and protective, with community features that emphasize sisterhood rather than shame.

Ensuring Cultural Relevance

Most existing wellness apps are tailored to Western audiences, which can make them feel distant or inappropriate in other contexts. FlowCare's visuals, characters, and examples were intentionally grounded in African settings and everyday realities so that users could immediately recognize themselves in the experience.

First-Time Smartphone Users

Many users were expected to have limited prior experience with mobile apps. This led to an emphasis on simple flows, large tap targets, linear navigation, and clear feedback — helping girls build confidence as they learned to navigate both the app and their own health.

Project Scope & Responsibilities

As the sole designer on FlowCare, the responsibility covered the full UX/UI process, visual identity, and storytelling for the product. This included defining the overall experience, crafting the logo and brand system, designing key user flows, and creating the high-fidelity screens that bring the app to life.
Key contributions:

  • Visual identity and logo that express compassion, empowerment, and dignity
  • Custom color palette and UI components tailored to low-end devices and young users
  • Layouts and screen flows for core features like cycle tracking, education, community, and logging
  • Illustrations and icons that reflect local culture and daily life
  • UX decisions shaped around connectivity constraints and first-time smartphone use

The project combined health research, advocacy, and user-centered design, turning a sensitive topic into a supportive, accessible digital experience.

Tools Used

The FlowCare experience was shaped using a mix of UX, visual, and AI-assisted tools that supported both speed and cultural relevance.

  • Figma:
    Primary Wireframes, design systems, and interactive prototypes. Screens, components, and flows were iterated here to ensure clarity and flexibility across devices.
  • Canva:
    Helpful for exploring layout directions, testing typographic hierarchy, and preparing presentation-ready visuals to communicate the concept with stakeholders.
  • Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop:
    Supporting Used to refine icons, polish illustrations, and ensure all visual assets remained crisp, legible, and on-brand at different sizes and resolutions.
  • Leonardo AI:
    Image Generation Used to generate culturally relevant illustrations and character concepts that reflect African girls and village environments. Outputs were curated and refined into final illustrations.

Combining these tools made it possible to move efficiently from concept to detailed UI, while still giving space for nuance, storytelling, and cultural sensitivity.

Educational Imagery

Each module of FlowCare’s educational content is anchored by a custom illustration generated through Leonardo AI and refined to match the visual identity. The illustrations were designed to feel familiar to users in rural Northern Uganda — culturally specific, dignified, and emotionally warm.

User Research & Personas

To ground FlowCare in real user needs, a set of representative personas was developed based on the project brief, contextual research, and direct conversations with the NGO founder in Uganda. Communication across time zones and differing connectivity made ongoing dialogue challenging, so after an initial conversation with him, Perplexity AI was used to help structure additional background research and refine assumptions about the context.

These personas represent three distinct user archetypes, each with unique barriers, needs, and goals.

These three personas shaped every design decision, ensuring that FlowCare serves girls at different life stages and roles—from first-time users seeking knowledge and reassurance, to emerging leaders and educators wanting to support their communities.

Joan, schoolgirl experiencing menarche

Joan

The First-Time User

Age
14
Location
Gulu, Northern Uganda

Bio

Joan is the eldest sister in her family and often takes the lead in caregiving. Though she never received menstrual education, she's eager to guide her younger sisters with knowledge and dignity.

Goals

  • Learn to support her sisters
  • Gain accurate wellness knowledge
  • Connect with peers in similar situations

Pain Points

  • Never received formal menstrual education
  • Struggles to explain things clearly to younger girls
  • Lacks a network to share experiences

App Needs

  • Peer chat and discussion forum
  • Wellness education in simple language
  • Shareable learning tools
I want to know what to tell my sisters when they ask me what's happening to their bodies.
Sarah, community health worker

Sarah

The Health Worker

Age
25
Location
Kampala Outskirts

Bio

Sarah leads menstrual health workshops in schools and villages. She's passionate about breaking stigma but lacks professional materials to teach with clarity and confidence.

Goals

  • Provide girls with accurate education
  • Improve community understanding of menstruation
  • Make workshops engaging and supportive

Pain Points

  • Limited access to training resources
  • Difficulty teaching low-literacy groups
  • No printed visuals for sessions

App Needs

  • Visual teaching aids and diagrams
  • Simplified cycle information
  • Offline-accessible content
I can teach the science, but I need the materials that make it land for girls who can't read it.
Amina, rural schoolgirl

Amina

The Schoolgirl

Age
13
Location
Northern Uganda

Bio

Amina just started her period and feels scared and unprepared. Without guidance at home or school, she often stays home during her cycle. She needs a safe way to learn what's happening to her body and how to manage it with dignity.

Goals

  • Understand her menstrual cycle
  • Reduce school absenteeism
  • Feel supported and confident

Pain Points

  • No female role model to guide her
  • Misses school due to fear of embarrassment
  • No central place to learn about menstrual health

App Needs

  • Simple period tracker
  • Illustrated hygiene tips
  • Emotionally safe, private interface
I want to learn what's happening without having to ask anyone.

Joan

The First-Time User

Age
14
Location
Gulu, Northern Uganda

Bio

Joan is the eldest sister in her family and often takes the lead in caregiving. Though she never received menstrual education, she's eager to guide her younger sisters with knowledge and dignity.

Goals

  • Learn to support her sisters
  • Gain accurate wellness knowledge
  • Connect with peers in similar situations

Pain Points

  • Never received formal menstrual education
  • Struggles to explain things clearly to younger girls
  • Lacks a network to share experiences

App Needs

  • Peer chat and discussion forum
  • Wellness education in simple language
  • Shareable learning tools
I want to know what to tell my sisters when they ask me what's happening to their bodies.

Sarah

The Health Worker

Age
25
Location
Kampala Outskirts

Bio

Sarah leads menstrual health workshops in schools and villages. She's passionate about breaking stigma but lacks professional materials to teach with clarity and confidence.

Goals

  • Provide girls with accurate education
  • Improve community understanding of menstruation
  • Make workshops engaging and supportive

Pain Points

  • Limited access to training resources
  • Difficulty teaching low-literacy groups
  • No printed visuals for sessions

App Needs

  • Visual teaching aids and diagrams
  • Simplified cycle information
  • Offline-accessible content
I can teach the science, but I need the materials that make it land for girls who can't read it.

Amina

The Schoolgirl

Age
13
Location
Northern Uganda

Bio

Amina just started her period and feels scared and unprepared. Without guidance at home or school, she often stays home during her cycle. She needs a safe way to learn what's happening to her body and how to manage it with dignity.

Goals

  • Understand her menstrual cycle
  • Reduce school absenteeism
  • Feel supported and confident

Pain Points

  • No female role model to guide her
  • Misses school due to fear of embarrassment
  • No central place to learn about menstrual health

App Needs

  • Simple period tracker
  • Illustrated hygiene tips
  • Emotionally safe, private interface
I want to learn what's happening without having to ask anyone.

Features Overview

Menstrual Cycle

At the heart of FlowCare is a clean, visual calendar tracker that helps users understand their body’s natural rhythm.
The cycle display uses color coding and intuitive symbols so that users can quickly see predicted period days, fertile windows, and wellness patterns.

Educational Resources

Educational modules cover essential topics like hygiene practices, period wellness, body changes, and reproductive health. Content is structured in short, digestible lessons paired with culturally relevant illustrations so that girls at any literacy level can understand and retain the information.

Ask-A-Sister

Ask-A-Sister is a community-driven forum where girls can post questions anonymously and receive thoughtful answers from trusted sources and peers. The feature is moderated to ensure safety and respect, creating a space where no question is too embarrassing or insignificant.

Daily Log

The Daily Log allows users to track their mood, physical symptoms, and daily experiences in a quick, low-pressure way. Over time, patterns emerge—connections between cycle phases, emotions, and bodily sensations become visible. This builds self-awareness, helps girls anticipate their needs, and creates valuable data that can support conversations with guardians or healthcare providers.

Offline Considerations

Because internet connectivity is inconsistent in many rural areas, FlowCare is designed with low-data usage as a priority. Core content is structured so it can be accessed with minimal connectivity, and a roadmap exists for future offline caching and downloadable content.

Menstrual Cycle

At the heart of FlowCare is a clean, visual calendar tracker that helps users understand their body’s natural rhythm.
The cycle display uses color coding and intuitive symbols so that users can quickly see predicted period days, fertile windows, and wellness patterns.

Educational Resources

Educational modules cover essential topics like hygiene practices, period wellness, body changes, and reproductive health. Content is structured in short, digestible lessons paired with culturally relevant illustrations so that girls at any literacy level can understand and retain the information.

Ask-A-Sister

Ask-A-Sister is a community-driven forum where girls can post questions anonymously and receive thoughtful answers from trusted sources and peers. The feature is moderated to ensure safety and respect, creating a space where no question is too embarrassing or insignificant.

Daily Log

The Daily Log allows users to track their mood, physical symptoms, and daily experiences in a quick, low-pressure way. Over time, patterns emerge—connections between cycle phases, emotions, and bodily sensations become visible. This builds self-awareness, helps girls anticipate their needs, and creates valuable data that can support conversations with guardians or healthcare providers.

Offline Considerations

Because internet connectivity is inconsistent in many rural areas, FlowCare is designed with low-data usage as a priority. Core content is structured so it can be accessed with minimal connectivity, and a roadmap exists for future offline caching and downloadable content.

Menstrual Cycle

At the heart of FlowCare is a clean, visual calendar tracker that helps users understand their body’s natural rhythm.
The cycle display uses color coding and intuitive symbols so that users can quickly see predicted period days, fertile windows, and wellness patterns.

Educational Resources

Educational modules cover essential topics like hygiene practices, period wellness, body changes, and reproductive health. Content is structured in short, digestible lessons paired with culturally relevant illustrations so that girls at any literacy level can understand and retain the information.

Ask-A-Sister

Ask-A-Sister is a community-driven forum where girls can post questions anonymously and receive thoughtful answers from trusted sources and peers. The feature is moderated to ensure safety and respect, creating a space where no question is too embarrassing or insignificant.

Daily Log

The Daily Log allows users to track their mood, physical symptoms, and daily experiences in a quick, low-pressure way. Over time, patterns emerge—connections between cycle phases, emotions, and bodily sensations become visible. This builds self-awareness, helps girls anticipate their needs, and creates valuable data that can support conversations with guardians or healthcare providers.

Offline Considerations

Because internet connectivity is inconsistent in many rural areas, FlowCare is designed with low-data usage as a priority. Core content is structured so it can be accessed with minimal connectivity, and a roadmap exists for future offline caching and downloadable content.

High-Fidelity Wireframes

The high-fidelity wireframes translate FlowCare’s concept into a cohesive, interactive product across key flows and screens. Each screen is designed with large tap targets, clear visual hierarchy, and minimal cognitive load so that first-time smartphone users can navigate confidently.

View The wireframes

Figma Makeathon Participation

From Wireframes to Interactive Prototype

In 2025, I participated in the Figma Makeathon powered by Contra—a vibrant global competition where thousands of designers pushed creative boundaries using Figma’s latest AI-assisted design and prototyping tools. The challenge was an exciting opportunity to evolve FlowCare from a concept into a fully realized, interactive digital experience.

Using Figma Make’s rapid prototyping and AI-assisted design features, I:

  • Refined the wireframe layouts with polished visual design and consistent components across all screens.
  • Built complete user flows for onboarding, cycle tracking, education, and community features.
  • Created interactive prototypes showcasing realistic user journeys.
  • Developed a story-driven Figma website to communicate FlowCare’s mission and impact.

The final result is a competition-ready prototype that demonstrates how thoughtful UX research, combined with modern AI-assisted tools, creates meaningful digital solutions.

View The wireframes

Design Complete

Impact Pending

Design Complete

Impact Pending

FlowCare is a fully-designed, interactive prototype that demonstrates how thoughtful UX design can create meaningful solutions for real-world challenges. Every design choice—from the visual identity to the supportive tone—was intentional: to empower girls to take control of their menstrual health on their own terms.
The project showcases how user-centered design, grounded in authentic research and cultural understanding, creates solutions that are both beautiful and deeply human.

Through the 2025 Figma Makeathon, I refined the prototype using AI-assisted tools and created a story-driven demonstration website to communicate FlowCare’s mission and impact. Every design choice—from the empowering pink and purple color palette to the supportive, stigma-free tone—was intentional, aiming to give girls control over their menstrual health on their own terms.

The prototype is complete and ready for development. To bring FlowCare to life, the NGO is actively seeking funding. Once resources are secured, the prototype will be handed to development partners to build and deploy the native mobile app.

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