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Women’s health app design: what founders get wrong
Women’s health app design mistakes: hidden privacy, pink clichés, one kind of user and narrow life stages. What to do instead.
Short answer
The most common women’s health app design mistakes are hiding privacy in a legal page, defaulting to pink clichés and one kind of user, and stopping at periods and pregnancy. Good women’s health app design makes data control visible, speaks plainly and lets people describe their own bodies and lives.
Women’s health has had a lot of investor attention in the past few years, and a lot of apps. Many of them look alike: soft pink, a few flowers, a smiling woman doing yoga, and a calendar.
Users have noticed, and so have regulators. Some of the most-used apps in the category have had public trouble over how they handle data, and plenty of women now think twice before logging anything at all.
These products handle very personal information, often at sensitive moments. Here are the mistakes we see most, and what to do instead.
18 of 25 got Mozilla’s privacy warning. Source: Mozilla Foundation, 2022.
Why is privacy a design problem in women’s health?
Because what users log can be some of the most personal data they own, and they know it. In 2022, the Mozilla Foundation reviewed popular period and pregnancy tracking apps and devices, and gave 18 of the 25 a “Privacy Not Included” warning label. The figure below shows the split.
This isn’t a hypothetical worry. In 2021 the US Federal Trade Commission settled with the maker of the Flo period tracker, an app used by more than 100 million consumers, over allegations that it shared health data, including the fact of a user’s pregnancy, with third parties such as Facebook’s and Google’s analytics services.
So design has a real job here. Your legal team decides what you do with data. Design decides whether users can see it, understand it and change it.
What do founders get wrong in women’s health app design?
The same five mistakes, again and again.
Privacy hidden in a policy.
If people have to read a policy to find out who sees their data, they’ll assume the worst. Put the essentials on the screen where the data goes in.Pink by default.
The colour is fine. The cliché is the problem. A palette, photos and tone that look like every other app quietly say “we didn’t think about you in particular”.One kind of user.
Not everyone tracking a cycle wants to get pregnant, is with a man or has a regular cycle. Defaults that assume one life story push everyone else out.Euphemisms.
Women are adults who know the names of their own body parts. Vague wording makes health information harder to understand and easier to misread.A narrow life stage.
Many apps stop at fertility and pregnancy. The WHO notes that women aged 50 and over made up 26% of all women and girls worldwide in 2021, and that awareness of and access to menopause information remain a significant challenge.
What does good women’s health app design look like?
Calm, precise and respectful of the user’s choices. In practice:
Visible data control.
Show what’s stored, where, and how to delete it, inside the app and in plain words. Offer use without an account where you can.Ask, don’t assume.
Let people tell you their goals and situation during onboarding, and let them change it later without starting over.A brand with a point of view.
Pick colour, type and imagery for your users and your promise, rather than for the category. Our post on whether a HealthTech brand should look clinical or friendly explains how to balance the two.Plain, correct language.
Medical terms where they’re needed, explained once, and no cute nicknames for body parts.
The audience is big. In a 2019 KFF survey, roughly 3 in 10 US women said they had used the internet or an app to track their fertility or menstrual cycle. That’s a lot of people deciding, every day, whether to trust an app with something personal.
In this category, trust is the product. A feature that collects more data than it needs is a cost, because every extra field is one more reason for a careful user to leave. Our post on onboarding, consent and permissions in HealthTech goes deeper on that first minute.
How we’d approach it
We’d start with what your users worry about, and get to the feature list after. For a women’s health app, that usually means:
Interview users about trust first.
What they’d never log, what they’ve stopped logging and why.Map every piece of data you collect.
Why you need it, where it goes and how the user controls it. Cut whatever you can’t justify.Design the privacy moments.
Onboarding, the first log, sharing with a partner or clinician, and deleting data. Test them with real users.Build a brand that doesn’t look like the category.
A visual and verbal identity that fits your users and your promise.
Bring your data map, your current onboarding and any user feedback about privacy. More on how we work.
A related example from our own work: Elli Cares, an app for people living with cognitive impairment and their families, includes location features and caregiver communication, designed with high contrast, simpler flows and a calm visual language. See the case study.
FAQ
What are the best agencies for women’s health or FemTech app design?
Look for a studio that can show you how it designed privacy and consent, as well as nice screens. Our list of healthcare UX design agencies in Europe is a good starting point.
Should a women’s health app avoid pink?
No. Just don’t choose it by default. Any colour can work if it fits your users and your promise.
Do we need an account system at all?
Not always. Ask what the user gains from an account. If the honest answer is “nothing yet”, offer local use first.
How do we design for menopause?
Talk to women going through it. Symptoms vary a lot, so let users describe theirs instead of ticking a fixed list.
Try this today
Open your app as a new user and count the screens before you find out who can see your data. If the answer is “none, it’s in the policy”, write one plain sentence that explains it and put it on the screen where people enter their first piece of health data. Then check whether users notice it.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your privacy moments, let’s talk.
About the author: Rori Thompson is a Content Writer at Dtail Studio and writes about product design, UX and the details that make an app easy to use.
Sources: Mozilla Foundation, Privacy Not Included review of period and pregnancy tracking apps (2022), US FTC, Flo Health settlement (2021), WHO, Menopause fact sheet (2024), KFF, Health Apps and Information Survey topline (2019)
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