Lowtide: a quiet place for busy minds
Sixteen short activities and six soundscapes for ADHD, anxiety and OCD. No sign-up, and nothing stored.
- Timeline
- Self-initiated
- Platform
- Web
- Role
- Design and build
- Team
- Just me
Overview
Most wellness apps are built to keep you coming back, and the tools they use for that can work against the people who need help most. Lowtide is my answer: a calm web space that opens on a painted lake with six places to go, each named for a feeling rather than a diagnosis.
I designed and built it on my own in Framer, and it's live above. I haven't tested it with neurodivergent users yet, so every decision here rests on published research, and testing is the first thing on the list. Most of this page is about what I chose to leave out.
The problem
Most wellness apps punish people for using them the way they actually need to.
They count streaks, time your sessions and reassure you over and over. For someone with ADHD, missing two days turns the app they opened for help into one more thing they're behind on. For someone with OCD, an app that keeps saying they're doing great feeds the need for reassurance that keeps the disorder going.
Research
Most people leave mental health apps within two weeks
Keeping people at all is hard. Across popular mental health apps, a median of just 3.9% of users still opened an app on day 15, and 3.3% on day 30. So Lowtide had to be easy to come back to, with no sign-up and nothing to catch up on.
Source: Baumel, Muench, Edan and Kane (2019), “Objective user engagement with mental health apps: systematic search and panel-based usage analysis”, Journal of Medical Internet Research 21(9).
A broken streak makes people give up
Streaks make it worse. Across seven studies, people who saw a broken streak were less likely to keep going than people whose streak was intact, especially when they blamed themselves for the break. For someone with ADHD who misses days, a streak turns one slip into a reason to stop.
Source: Silverman and Barasch (2023), “On or off track: how (broken) streaks affect consumer decisions”, Journal of Consumer Research 49(6).
Reassurance keeps OCD going
Reassurance is its own trap. People with OCD and anxiety disorders seek it far more often than others, and in OCD it eases the anxiety for a moment while keeping the cycle going. An app that keeps saying everything is fine does exactly that.
Source: Kobori and Salkovskis (2013), “Patterns of reassurance seeking and reassurance-related behaviours in OCD and anxiety disorders”, Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy 41(1).
Putting a worry off until later helps
Not every finding was a warning. In a randomised trial with 53 students who worried a lot, setting worries aside until a fixed time each day reduced worry, anxiety and insomnia more than worrying freely, and a later meta-analysis of seven trials found smaller but real drops. That one became a feature: the worry box.
Source: McGowan and Behar (2013), “A preliminary investigation of stimulus control training for worry”, Behavior Modification 37(1). Dippel et al. (2023), “Effects of worry postponement on daily worry: a meta-analysis”, International Journal of Cognitive Therapy.
Five rules I checked everything against
Put together, the research gave me five rules, and every decision after this had to pass all of them: nothing punishes you, stopping early is always fine (and the screen says so), you choose by how you feel rather than by a diagnosis, nothing reassures you on repeat, and no motion is forced on you.
Process
The home screen
Seven versions to get to one screen
The rules started with the home screen. The first version was a long website with a tab for every activity, and it looked like any other product site. Each version after it fixed the biggest problem with the one before, until the home screen became a single painted lake with one index beside it.
Six places, named for a feeling
The lake holds six places, each named for how you feel rather than what you've been diagnosed with: the Focus Sun for a scattered mind, the Calming Water for a racing one, and the Steady Boat for looping thoughts, with the Letting-Go Forest, the Playful Hills and the Listening Clouds covering the rest. Nowhere does the app say ADHD, anxiety or OCD.
Labels off the painting
To keep the art clean, the six places are listed in one index down the left, each with its number of tools. Hover a row and its landmark lights up in the painting, so the painting never needs labels.
The activities
Urge surf, with nothing to count
Inside the places, the hardest calls were about what to leave out. For OCD, the aim is to let an urge rise and fall without acting on it, so urge surf shows a marker riding a wave for 2, 5 or 10 minutes, the way an urge peaks and fades. I left out any counter, streak or “did you resist?”, because counting resisted urges is itself a form of checking.
No release games for OCD
The same caution decided where things live. Bubble wrap, paper tearing and block stacking help with ADHD and anxiety, but with OCD a repetitive action can turn into a ritual, so the Steady Boat holds only urge surf and paced breathing.
A worry box that never locks
The worry box is the research turned into a feature. You write a worry down, seal it, and choose when to open it again: tonight, tomorrow or next week. A “Look now anyway” button is always there, because locking someone out of their own words could make things worse.
Help is one tap away
Whatever else the app leaves out, it never leaves out help. A crisis card sits on the home screen at all times, opening six verified Indian helplines that dial when you tap them.
The craft
A painting drawn in code
The first painting was a 512px image that fell apart at full screen, so I redrew it in code. A rough shape is split into smaller pieces again and again, then drawn twelve to twenty-two times at 3 to 5% opacity, so the overlaps pool like watercolour on wet paper. Each of the fifty variations always draws the same painting.
The system
Each colour means one thing
The system keeps the same calm. Each accent colour means one thing everywhere: clay for focus, sage for calm and breathing, lavender for anxiety and OCD, rose for release and sky for sound. Anything you read or write sits on warm paper, and anything you watch or listen to gets a dark scene.
Next phase
The first step is testing: five to eight moderated sessions with people who have ADHD, anxiety or OCD, then a review of the OCD tools by a specialist before any public launch, and a proper phone layout.
Then a harder question: for a product that won't measure its users, what counts as proof that it helped?
Reflection
Lowtide taught me that leaving things out can be the most important design work. A counter on urge surf, release games in the OCD place or a lock on the worry box would each have been easy to add, and each would have made the product less safe.
It also showed me a habit of my own. I like building, so I built every activity before testing any of them. Next time, the first sessions with real users come before the tenth feature.