I led end-to-end UX design for Breathefree, Cipla's lung-care app: turning a cluttered, low-adherence tool into a guided, habit-forming daily companion for people managing asthma, COPD, and allergic rhinitis.
Turn a declining, hard-to-navigate lung-care app into a guided, habit-forming daily companion, one built around small, trackable tasks Cipla's patients could actually stick with.
Breathefree's daily active users were declining 2-3% every month. Engagement was down, uninstalls were up, and adherence to daily lung-care routines, the entire point of the app, was low. The homepage itself was part of the problem: users described it as cluttered and confusing, unsure of where to go or what the app was even for.
Core features were barely discovered. Most users only ever touched the breathing exercises, the simplest feature to find, while everything else went unused, especially among users in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. The app lacked guidance and a sense of credibility, in a category where trust in the tool is inseparable from trust in the guidance it gives.
I ran a cohort analysis alongside direct app feedback from active users, transcribing every response and running it through thematic analysis and affinity mapping to find patterns in how people were actually managing their condition day to day.
The clearest pattern: users in their 20s and 30s, newly diagnosed, were proactive about finding solutions, but doctor consultations were too short to give them the day-to-day guidance they needed. Nearly everyone had already built their own workaround routine, alarms, medicine reminders, YouTube breathing videos, home remedies, stitched together outside the app entirely.
Rather than guess at a roadmap, I had users rate how useful they’d find each candidate feature for managing their lung health. The scores split cleanly into tiers, and gave the team an evidence-backed order to build in.
Also tested: a pulmonary rehabilitation program and wearable integration. Neither drew a strong response, so both were parked.
All 5 interviewees already did breathing exercises inside the app, most 3–5 times a week, and it had the highest activity of any home-page feature. With no other lung-care app treating this as a hook, it was the clearest bet in the whole research set. We gave it dedicated space on the home page, expanded the exercise library, and added visible milestones and progress so the habit had something to show for itself.
3 of 4 users already took medicines regularly and used the app to mark intake, but one had only started taking her condition seriously after facing real consequences: exactly the guidance gap the rest of the research kept surfacing. We fixed the status-editing bugs in the existing flow and pushed automatic reminders tied to prescriptions, rather than shipping a flashier feature nobody had asked for.
My approach was to give users something to do, not just something to read. Research made it clear people needed tasks to see real-world impact, so I leaned on the trust patients already had in their Cipla doctors and turned that trust into a system of personalized, doctor-aligned daily tasks.
I converted research findings into a prioritized set of action items, then redesigned the homepage itself around task completion: vibrant, interactive logging journeys with motivational affirmations, and a streak-and-reward system layered on top to keep the habit going once it started.
Users need tasks to do in order to see real-world impact. Since they trust Cipla doctors, they are already motivated to use the app. We need to push tasks like tracking peak flow rate, medicine doses, and breathing exercises to different cohorts in the most effective way.
Since the home page was heading towards a task-oriented app, our focus was to create task logging journeys that are interesting and insightful. This was done by using bright colors, interactive data input, and positive affirmations.
Gamifying the app was our way of engaging users better and helping them build good habits. Our interviews with people who have lung conditions showed us how important it is to make the process fun and rewarding.
