Building the bridge between designers and developers on a wellness app for ironworkers
Solace is a mobile recovery app built for ironworkers — a group with high rates of chronic pain and almost no tools designed for their reality. This was a 3-month school project where I acted as lead developer, UI/UX researcher, and the main point of contact between the design and dev sides of the team.
My Role
/ Dev Lead + Market Research + UI UX Designer
Skills
Category
/ Wellness App
Timeline & Context
/ 3-month school project
Context
Every week I was the one asking “okay, how do we actually build this?” — turning ideas into tasks, flagging what wasn't feasible, and simplifying flows that felt heavy in real use.
What I Did
Research and personas
On the research side, the team ran surveys and interviews with ironworkers. I took that data, added my own research on top of it, and used it to develop the personas. I helped shape the primary persona and owned the secondary one end-to-end — built to make sure we were also addressing experienced, longer-tenured workers in the trades.
From there the decisions were
Advocated for Expo + React Native as the core framework after talking with instructors and mapping out how complex the app could get.
- Fast setup for a mixed-skill team
- Reliable mobile tooling and device testing
- Scales with React Native as complexity grows
Contributed to the design and built most of the onboarding flow, supporting tap, type, or voice inputs while still producing clean data for the AI checklist.
Scoped the AI integration so it only matched user input to existing exercises in our database, never generating medical advice.
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Designed Solace business cards.
Maintained the project blog throughout the timeline.
Contributed to the build of the promotional website.
Constraints
Mixed-skill team, 3-month timeline, school context. A lot of my energy went into keeping the project shippable — cutting features that weren't pulling their weight and simplifying anything that added complexity without clear value.
Takeaways and outcome
Takeaways
The bridge role is underrated. A lot of good ideas die because no one translates them into something buildable. Being the person who could read a Figma file and write the code for it meant the team moved faster and with less friction. I also learned that scoping AI conservatively isn't a limitation — it's what made the feature trustworthy.
Outcome
Solace shipped within the 3-month timeline. Usability testing surfaced navigation and mascot clarity issues that we addressed before the final build. The app, blog, and print materials were all delivered as a cohesive package. Solace was also one of the winners at the annual BCIT Showcase.
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