App Redesign.

Origins

I was contacted in the summer of 2025 about working with independent developer Ryan Ashcraft to update Foodnoms, his popular nutrition tracking app. Over the summer Apple had announced its new design language coming to products such as the iPhone and adopting this design system would require large changes and exciting opportunities for the Foodnoms app.

After drafting some initial ideas (sample shown below) for how Foodnoms could adapt and take advantage of various elements of this new design, I was brought onboard as the primary UI/UX designer for a complete visual overhaul of the app to support Apple's design guidelines.

Challenges

This project was approached with two primary objectives: to utilize Apple's new "Liquid Glass" design elements in a way that was faithful to their intended purpose and to take advantage of the opportunity to redesign existing elements of the app to be simpler to use.

Our north star for this project was Apple's own Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), an invaluable tool as we sought to build a version of Foodnoms that felt more at home on an iPhone than ever before.

As we set out to redesign Foodnoms, we encountered a number of problems. First, Apple's stated "best practices" for Liquid Glass immediately ruled out keeping several parts of Foodnoms' existing interface: mainly using both a tab bar and toolbar buttons at the bottom of the main view.

Our primary challenge was to design a new core navigation structure that kept key buttons and controls in a reachable location at the bottom of the screen. Positioning buttons and controls in the bottom toolbar meant that we would be unable to also utilize a tab bar in the app, the previously dominant navigation component in Foodnoms.

Removing the app's tab bar presented several challenges, but it also offered a wonderful opportunity to make the app visually simpler and more streamlined. Tab bars can be an overused shortcut to silo-off elements of an app without wrestling through how to create a single, integrated experience for the user. Instead, focusing on a more thoughtful, single experience led us to design navigation that was ultimately much more intentional and connected.

Creating the app's new core navigation was a highly iterative process. I worked closely and actively with the developer as I created visual mockups of potential designs and they prototyped those layouts in real time (several mockups of our early ideas are shown below).

Design

The final design for this update to Foodnoms consists of a more robust integrated daily summary of the users nutrient goals, meals and nutritional summaries. Additional views, such as a collection of data "Insights" and a user's library of custom meals, recipes, and foods are quickly accessible from a Root view or in a sidebar on larger tablet displays.

In addition to my UX work on the app's core navigation, I created hundreds of design boards and mockups in Sketch to facilitate and actively redesign every major feature in the app. I reorganized the app's settings page with a simpler layout, developed the new "Insights" dashboard from the ideation phase to the final product, and proposed the new interface for a nutrient's details where a user accesses a particular day's nutrient data from within a weekly or month chart instead of navigating to a separate view.

Results

All of these new designs and interface elements, created in close collaboration with the app's creator and developer, result in a significantly simplified and streamlined experience for Foodnoms users.

The app in its new form can be viewed in the App Store.