Introducing Pearl: Wellness Reminders

A video showing pearl creation in action.

This app started in the middle of the pandemic. I wanted to remember something good. And something true.

So I came up with Pearl: reminders created by the person using the app. You set the time frame when you want the reminders to appear. And they show up at a random time within that period. And the app gives suggestions, or prompts, for writing meaningful notifications.

I knew I wasn’t going to make a replacement for therapy or a long talk with a friend. I wouldn’t try to sustain mental health with a randomized notification system. I’m bipolar myself, and know the world isn’t that simple.

In fact, I wasn’t sure I did want the app until I used it for a while. The cynic in me thought, ah, great, nothing like unnecessary notifications to make you stare into your screen for the sake of well being.

And yet I wanted to be interrupted, with spontaneity, with a bit of whimsy, with reminders of what I knew to be most valuable. I know what’s important in life. It’s just hard to remember it sometimes.

I made this for me, and I wanted to make it as nice as possible. That’s why it’s coming out now rather than last fall or winter.

I didn’t want the process of making a wellness app to burn me out. So I spent WAY too long going through all kinds of designs. Waterfalls grids, and mosaics and flippy cards. Half a dozen kinds of animations. Just playing with things, seeing what I could do. Even after I got to the basic flow and feature set, I got more help refining that design even further!

I worked on the little things. For instance, an ellipses in the prompts marks a natural place where people can personalize the suggestion. When the card pops up, I didn’t want the user to need to tap on the text, so the keyboard and selection appears for them. And when there is an ellipses, I didn’t want the user to need to go through the trouble to select the ellipses, so I do that for them. Little interactions like that.

Then I made it as nice as I could on iPad, and on the Mac, so that Pearl would feel at home in those environments, not just as a copy-paste of the iPhone design.

I also wanted first-class accessibility. So there are controls for VoiceOver, and I made sure the app still looked good and worked well with even the biggest dynamic text sizes someone can pick in their accessibility settings. I aimed to respect reduced motion and reduced transparency settings, and got help to get a good color scheme for colorblind folks (I’m red-green colorblind myself).

And of course I added widgets, and custom icons, because those are awesome.

Even with all my work there are still bugs (at least one, swipy text isn’t behaving well, dang it), but I’ll work those out.

So here it is. I hope you find as much value in Pearl as I have. And I wish you well-being no matter your situation.