Designing a habit-forming prayer app from 0 → 1

Millions of people want to pray consistently, yet remembering what to pray for and returning to those commitments over time is surprisingly difficult.

Existing solutions generally fall into two categories: note-taking apps that aren’t built for recurring habits, and prayer apps centered around guided content rather than personal organization.

Instead of telling users how to pray, we focused on helping them remember what they wanted to pray for through thoughtful organization, lightweight scheduling, and an interface designed to encourage daily use.

This case study focuses on the product design decisions behind creating and shipping a subscription-based iOS application from concept to App Store.

My business partner and I both wanted a better way to organize the people and topics we wanted to pray for.

Paper journals weren’t a good fit for us, and existing productivity apps felt too generic. Reminder apps, notes apps, and task managers all required users to build their own organizational system.

Many prayer apps emphasized guided prayers, meditation content, or prescribed spiritual experiences. Others had outdated interfaces, inconsistent interaction patterns, or organizational models that became difficult to maintain over time.

We believed there was an opportunity to create something much simpler: an opinionated organizational framework that helped people remember what mattered without dictating how they should pray.

Rather than inventing folders, tags, or nested hierarchies, our research suggested a much simpler model.

The information architecture mirrors how users already think instead of forcing them to learn a new organizational system. This dramatically reduces onboarding friction while making future scheduling intuitive.

Scheduling became the most difficult product problem. Traditional calendar interfaces expose enormous flexibility but also significant complexity.

We wanted users to receive the benefits of recurring reminders without feeling like they were creating calendar events. The final solution intentionally constrained the experience.

Most users simply assign people, groups, or topics to one or more days of the week. Power users can create more advanced recurring schedules, but the primary workflow remains fast enough to complete in seconds.

Solving the most common use case created a dramatically better product than supporting every possible edge case.

Unlike social platforms or productivity tools, Praily begins completely empty. Every piece of content is user-generated.

Rather than presenting a sparse interface that emphasized the absence of content, we wanted first launch to feel welcoming and engaging.

Early versions leaned heavily on standard iOS components. As the product matured, we introduced a more opinionated visual language inspired by neo-brutalism.

Large interface elements, generous spacing, bold colors, and expressive shadows help the product feel alive even before users have populated it with content. The experience feels rewarding without relying on streaks, points, badges, or other gamification mechanics.

Praily was a true 0 → 1 product. Working alongside my business partner, I led product strategy, user experience, interaction design, branding, visual design, and much of the application’s front-end implementation.

To accelerate development, we integrated AI into our engineering workflow. AI generated much of the implementation, while I remained responsible for product direction, architecture, interaction design, feature definition, and validating every shipped experience.

Using AI shifted more time toward solving product problems and refining the experience instead of repetitive implementation work.