Nourishing Storm
May 2022
Overview
As part of a UX Design course at Penn State, I took on the challenge of reimagining the mobile app experience for Nourishing Storm, a local yoga studio, café, and wellness community in Hatboro, Pennsylvania. The project involved end-to-end design thinking: from conducting foundational research to understand user needs and pain points, to translating those insights into wireframes, and ultimately bringing select screens to life through a refined, interactive prototype. While scoped to a focused set of screens, the work was grounded in the same rigor and intentionality that drives professional UX practice, with the goal of creating a digital experience as welcoming and intuitive as the studio itself.
Background
Nourishing Storm is a yoga studio, café, and wellness community located at 122 N. York Road in Hatboro, Pennsylvania. Founded by owner Kristin Ritter, the studio has become a cornerstone of the Hatboro community, built on the belief that wellness should be “easy, fun, and approachable.” (Nourishing Storm)
The studio offers weekly classes — both indoor and outdoor — monthly yoga and food-inspired workshops, private and group health coaching, and an array of healthy foods through its in-house café. Its offerings extend to yoga classes, private sessions, holistic health coaching, and community events and parties — making it far more than a typical studio. It is a living, breathing wellness ecosystem.
Identifying the Problem
The original Nourishing Storm app struggled to reflect the warmth and intentionality of the business it represented. Through a combination of competitive analysis and secondary research, including Facebook posts, community reviews, and public profiles, a clear picture of the user experience gap began to take shape.
The research revealed two compounding issues. First, the app’s visual design lacked the polish and consistency that users have come to expect from a modern wellness brand. Typography, color, and layout choices felt inconsistent and underdeveloped, failing to communicate the calm, welcoming identity that Nourishing Storm embodies in person. Second, the app’s structure was cluttered and overwhelming, presenting users with too much information without a clear hierarchy to guide them through it. Rather than feeling like an effortless entry point into the Nourishing Storm community, the app felt like a barrier to it.
With these insights in hand, the problem was clear: Nourishing Storm needed a redesigned mobile experience that honored the quality and spirit of the studio itself. The scope of this project focused on three key screens where these issues were most apparent: the Home screen, the Events and Workshops section, and the Class Description page. These touchpoints represent the core of how a new or returning user discovers, evaluates, and engages with what Nourishing Storm has to offer, making them the highest-impact areas to address first.
To better understand where Nourishing Storm sits in the market, a competitive landscape was mapped across the four categories that define the brand: yoga studios, cafés, health-conscious food options, and local art. The result was a Venn diagram that illustrated just how unique Nourishing Storm’s positioning really is.
While competitors exist in each individual category, very few businesses overlap across all four. Nourishing Storm sits at that rare intersection, offering a combination of wellness, community, nourishment, and creativity that no single competitor fully replicates. This analysis reinforced that the app needed to reflect that distinctiveness. A generic, one-size-fits-all wellness app template would not do justice to a business this multifaceted. The redesign needed to honor the full breadth of what Nourishing Storm offers and make it easy for users to explore all of it in one place.
Ideation
To ground the redesign in real human needs, three distinct user groups were identified based on the types of people most likely to interact with the Nourishing Storm app. Rather than designing for a single, generalized user, this process helped ensure that each design decision could be evaluated against the goals, motivations, and frustrations of people with different relationships to the brand.
Together, these three personas represent the full spectrum of what Nourishing Storm offers, and they served as a constant reference point throughout every stage of the design process.
To move beyond surface-level demographics and truly understand the emotional landscape of the primary user, an empathy map was developed for Carol, the Community Seeker. This exercise pushed the design thinking deeper, asking not just what Carol needs from an app, but what she is carrying with her when she opens it.
Carol is stretched thin. As a public school teacher and mother of two, her days are packed with responsibilities that extend well beyond herself. She is driving her kids to school, making lesson plans, managing her household, and advocating for causes she believes in. Time is her scarcest resource, and the weight of feeling pulled in every direction by work, her husband, and her kids is a constant undercurrent in her daily life.
Emotionally, Carol is longing for something more. She misses her friends. She feels the monotony of days that blur together and craves excitement and something different. Living through the aftermath of COVID left her feeling isolated, anxious about her family’s safety, and deeply unsettled by the state of the world. What she needs is not just a yoga class. She needs an escape, a community, and a safe way to reconnect with people who share her values.
This is exactly why the Nourishing Storm app matters to someone like Carol. When she opens it, she is not simply browsing a schedule. She is looking for a reason to show up for herself. That insight made it clear that the redesign needed to do more than organize information cleanly. It needed to feel warm, inviting, and worth her very limited time.
With the user personas and empathy mapping complete, the next step was translating those insights into concrete use case scenarios. These scenarios bridge the gap between who the users are and what the app actually needs to do for them, grounding every feature consideration in a real human situation rather than assumption.
The first scenario centers on a woman seeking community and belonging. Not just a yoga class, but her people. This pointed to the need for a dedicated Community Tab, monitored and categorized chatrooms, and a customizable profile that lets her feel at home within the Nourishing Storm community.
The second scenario focuses on a health-conscious user looking for clean, local food that aligns with her dietary values. This led to a Café Menu Tab that goes beyond listing items, one that displays ingredient sourcing and clear labels for dietary needs like vegan and gluten-free options. For this user, transparency is everything.
The third scenario reflects a busy professional who needs to decompress and needs the app to get out of her way while she does it. This shaped some of the most impactful design decisions in the project: a direct scheduling link on the Home screen, saved payment information for frictionless checkout, and a class schedule with both list and calendar views.
Together, these scenarios ensured that every layout choice and navigation decision had a real person and a real need behind it.
Design & Prototyping
With research and user insights firmly established, the design phase began in Figma, moving from early wireframes to a polished high-fidelity prototype. Every decision made at this stage was traced back to the needs of Carol, Chelsea, and Jennifer, ensuring the visual and structural choices served real users rather than aesthetic preference alone.
The color palette draws from Nourishing Storm’s existing brand identity, using deep plum, earthy green, and clean white to strike a balance between warmth and clarity. The result is an interface that feels grounded and approachable, qualities that mirror the studio’s in-person atmosphere. Typography was kept simple and readable, and consistent header styling across all screens gives the app a sense of cohesion that the original lacked.
Three key screens were redesigned and brought to life in the prototype:
- Home Screen (left): A welcoming entry point that surfaces upcoming events and classes immediately, so users like Jennifer can find and act on what they need without digging through menus. A clear navigation bar at the bottom gives every major section of the app equal, intuitive access.
- Class Schedule (middle): A clean, date-organized list view with a toggle to switch between list and calendar views, addressing one of the most significant pain points in the original experience. Each class entry displays the time, name, and instructor at a glance, reducing friction for busy users.
- Activity Details (right): A dedicated class description screen that consolidates everything a user needs to know, including the class description, staff member, and studio location, all in one structured, easy-to-read layout.
The prototype brings these screens together into an interactive flow that demonstrates how a user would move from the Home screen to browsing the schedule and drilling into a specific class. It is a focused slice of the experience, but one that addresses the core problems identified at the start of the project.
Image Credits
[Nourishing Storm Wellness Co. yoga class]. (2026). Nourishing Storm. https://www.nourishingstorm.com/about