Gutsy

A digital community built to connect and support mothers.

Overview

Mothership explores how a faith-based community could better support mothers through a digital experience built around connection, shared resources, mentorship, and meaningful relationships.

my role

UX & Product Design
UX Research
Visual Design
Illustration & Data Visualization

team

Independent project

timeline

8 months

platform

Nonprofit community website

tools

Figma
Adobe Creative Cloud
Pencil & paper
Zoom

deliverables

Research
Design system
Interactive prototype
Case study

the product

A place for Catholic mothers to find support, resources, and one another.

Explore the interactive prototype, or continue through the story below.

Jump to Prototype

Essential Flows

home

resources

connect

the challenge

Motherhood can be deeply rewarding—and deeply isolating.

Many mothers have to navigate practical needs, family life, faith, and personal well-being across disconnected resources, relationships, and environments.

How might we connect mothers with practical resources, community, and mentorship in a way that feels warm, trustworthy, and easy to navigate?

DISCOVERY

Empathizing with Catholic moms.

Conversations revealed needs that extended well beyond faith and into everyday life.

listening first

Mothers’ needs were practical, ranging from housekeeping, to mentorship, to companionship.

Conversations with Catholic mothers surfaced needs ranging from childcare and household support to faith, self-care, and friendship. Across these different concerns, one theme kept returning: mothers wanted trusted people they could turn to.

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conversations lead to themes

Different challenges pointed to the same need: support.

Interviews surfaced concerns spanning faith, family life, self-care, household responsibilities, and friendship. Affinity mapping helped organize those individual experiences into recurring themes, revealing where mothers needed practical help and where they simply needed one another.

What patterns revealed

Mothers needed support that felt practical, personal, and connected.

The research pointed beyond a simple resource directory. Three principles began shaping Mothership: practical help, meaningful relationships, and faith woven naturally into everyday life.

01

PRACTICAL
SUPPORT

Everyday needs—from childcare to transportation to housekeeping—called for simple ways to ask for and to offer help.

KEY INSIGHT

Tracking has to feel easier than remembering.

02

COMMUNITY
& CONNECTION

Friendship, companionship, and mentorship emerged alongside practical needs, making human connection central to the experience.

KEY INSIGHT

Tracking has to feel easier than remembering.

03

FAITH IN
DAILY LIFE

Faith wasn’t separate from motherhood. Mothers wanted ways to pray, learn, share resources, and support one another within their Catholic community.

KEY INSIGHT

Tracking has to feel easier than remembering.

our user

Support needs change with every season of motherhood.

Colleen represents mothers balancing family responsibilities with limited time, energy, and nearby support. Her needs grounded Mothership in a central question: how could a community make it easier for Colleen to ask for help, offer help, and stay meaningfully connected?

patterns revealed

Feeling needed was as important as practical support.

Across different ages, backgrounds, and stages of motherhood, interviews revealed more than a need for help. Mothers also wanted meaningful ways to contribute, connect, and feel valued. Support needed to work in both directions, making it easy to ask for help while creating opportunities to give it.

The opportunity was to create a community where both asking for help and offering it could feel equally natural.

Early direction

Turning my findings into something tangible.

I began sketching ways to translate a broad range of needs into one supportive, approachable experience for mothers.

ideas to insight

I began by exploring what support could look like.

The research pointed to needs ranging from friendship and faith to childcare, transportation, and everyday household help. I began sketching how those different forms of support could live within one approachable experience.

structuring the experience

Then I worked out how those needs could live together.

Early sketches explored how practical resources, community, faith, and opportunities to help others could coexist within one clear experience. I worked through page structures and content relationships before committing to a visual direction.

3 cards**

****

***

01

TOO MUCH TO TRACK

Information overload

Keeping track of everything affecting how I feel can become another task in itself.

KEY INSIGHT

Health information is scattered across symptoms, food, sleep, medication, stress, and daily routines.

02

PATTERNS ARE HARD TO SEE

Delayed cause & affect

Sometimes I know something made me feel worse, but I don't know what it was.

KEY INSIGHT

Symptoms may appear long after a choice or behavior, making cause and effect difficult to recognize.

03

DATA NEEDS CONTEXT

Knowing what matters

I can record what happened, but that doesn't necessarily tell me why it happened.

KEY INSIGHT

Logging alone isn't enough. People need help turning scattered information into meaningful patterns.

The research clarified what mothers needed. The next challenge was giving those needs a form that felt welcoming, useful, and distinct.

DISCOVERY

Understanding
life with an
invisible illness.

Research and conversations revealed a problem larger than symptom tracking: making sense of what the body was telling them.

RESEARCH

Mapping the complexity.

I mapped out the research to understand the scale of chronic digestive disorders and how symptoms, behaviors, and everyday circumstances intersect by making an infographic that summarizes it all.

USER CONVERSATIONS

Six conversations revealed how difficult it is to connect everyday choices with how you feel.

Participants described tracking symptoms, food, sleep, stress, and other factors across disconnected tools (or simply trying to remember them). The opportunity lay in connecting what the they were already experiencing.

01

TOO MUCH TO TRACK

Information overload

Keeping track of everything affecting how I feel can become another task in itself.

KEY INSIGHT

Health information is scattered across symptoms, food, sleep, medication, stress, and daily routines.

02

PATTERNS ARE HARD TO SEE

Delayed cause & affect

Sometimes I know something made me feel worse, but I don't know what it was.

KEY INSIGHT

Symptoms may appear long after a choice or behavior, making cause and effect difficult to recognize.

03

DATA NEEDS CONTEXT

Knowing what matters

I can record what happened, but that doesn't necessarily tell me why it happened.

KEY INSIGHT

Logging alone isn't enough. People need help turning scattered information into meaningful patterns.

THE HIDDEN BURDEN

Managing your health often becomes another source of stress.

People were already navigating pain, fatigue, unpredictable symptoms, and disrupted routines. Tracking it all could become another task on an already difficult day.

What patterns revealed

Tracking symptoms alone didn't make living with chronic illness any easier.

People weren't struggling to collect health information as much as understand what it meant. Three principles shaped the design:

01

REDUCE THE
BURDEN

Make logging simple enough to fit into daily life (not become another health-related task).

KEY INSIGHT

Tracking has to feel easier than remembering.

01

REDUCE THE
BURDEN

Make logging simple enough to fit into daily life (not become another health-related task).

KEY INSIGHT

Tracking has to feel easier than remembering.

01

REDUCE THE
BURDEN

Make logging simple enough to fit into daily life (not become another health-related task).

KEY INSIGHT

Tracking has to feel easier than remembering.

MEETing THE USER

Chronic illness doesn't stop when everyday life gets busy.

Our representative user has to balance chronic illness with an already demanding life.

competitor audit

Existing health tools capture data, but rarely connect the whole story.

I evaluated health tracking, symptom logging, nutrition, and patient-management apps. Most handled one part of the experience well, but few connected symptoms, food, sleep, stress, medication, and other factors into meaningful patterns.

Experience Synthesis

Mapping the emotional journey revealed where support mattered most.

I mapped my user’s day to identify where symptoms, uncertainty, and the effort of managing her health created the most friction (and where a product could meaningfully help).

Managing Brenda’s condition wasn’t one task, but dozens of small decisions competing with the rest of her life.

Design evolution

Finding a warm visual language that felt like a mother's embrace.

I explored symbols, typography, illustration, and botanical forms, looking for an identity that felt distinctly Catholic and maternal without becoming overly literal.

Design Goals

find support

Make practical help easy to find and act on.

build connection

Create meaningful connections between mothers in their community.

feel welcoming

Make support feel warm, approachable, and human.

Coherence

Consistent design language across flows.
‍

Clarity

Straightforward UI,
no hidden steps.

Simplicity

Only the essentials,
easy decisions.
‍

Exploring the language

I started wide before narrowing the visual direction.

I considered icons of motherhood, faith, support, and connection, including Marian and mother-and-child imagery, nautical references, Catholic architectural forms, and more abstract marks. Sketching broadly helped reveal which ideas felt meaningful, welcoming, and distinct without becoming too literal or cheap looking.

WORDMARK EXPLORATION

The name became part of the identity.

Before Mothership, I explored names like Prompt Succor and Hope Garden, each reflecting different ideas around support and community. Once Mothership emerged as the strongest direction, I experimented with hand lettering, serif forms, script, and nautical details to find a wordmark that felt distinctive without losing warmth. I even asked my own mother to write Mothership in her distinctive cursive, adding something genuinely personal to the exploration. The strongest directions ultimately moved away from literal mother and nautical symbolism toward something more personal and expressive.

mapping the environment

The visual language I established needed an environment to live in.

In parallel with the identity, I explored how Mothership could organize resources, community, and practical support without overwhelming mothers with options. These early sketches tested content hierarchy, responsive layouts, navigation, imagery, and ways to connect different types of information within one flexible system, establishing the foundation for the site’s structure.

early interfaces

Testing the nautical metaphor on the page.

Early interface sketches brought the nautical identity directly into the experience, using waves, coastlines, organic shapes, and map-like compositions alongside more conventional content structures. Seeing those ideas applied to actual pages helped me distinguish between visual elements that gave Mothership character and those that pushed the metaphor too far.

botanical direction

Every mother loves flowers.

As the identity developed, I began exploring botanical forms as a softer counterpoint to the more literal symbols. Flowers brought warmth, femininity, and a sense of care into the visual language while giving me an expressive system that could extend beyond the wordmark and into the experience itself.

taming the palette

The flowers brought warmth, but also a lot of color conflict.

As I developed the floral language, harmonizing their naturally intense colors with the rest of the identity became a challenge. I experimented with different palettes and treatments before realizing the flowers did not need color to provide warmth. After many iterations, simplifying them into delicate outlines let their forms carry the personality while giving the typography, imagery, and content more room to breathe.

The smartest solution wasn’t another device, but making the technology people already use work harder for them.

Somewhere between the sketches, flowers, words, and wireframes, Mothership began to feel like a cozy place.

Convergence

A clear identity starts taking shape.

Research, structure, and visual exploration began coming together in a unified direction. Mothership was becoming warmer, simpler, and more cohesive, with a language that could extend naturally beyond the brand and into the experience.

Refining the experience

I next established a visual rhythm.

As the layouts developed, hierarchy, navigation, imagery, and content began working together more naturally. These iterations helped establish how Mothership could hold many kinds of resources while remaining clear and approachable.

visual wayfinding

Recognizing support was a big part of the project. I developed a visual system to help guide users.

I created a custom icon family for Mothership’s services, including mentoring, childcare, housekeeping, carpooling, prayer groups, and catechism. A consistent, simplified drawing style gave each category its own character while making the larger set feel connected.

FINDING THE BALANCE

The pieces were there; the balance was a little hard to find.

As the identity evolved, I admittedly struggled with all the sugary elements. Before I realized floral outlines would work better than full-color botanicals, the pinks, purples, and psychedelic spectrum of polychromatic petals felt too saccharine; more like a kitschy canvas than an inviting community. While contrast and composition lacked balance, I eventually found it in deep, vibrant greens and a light cream, reflecting the botanical, comforting, growth-inspired concept behind Mothership. Warm photography kept the experience human, while reducing the flowers to two forms, solid fills on colored backgrounds and simple strokes over cream, brought unity and clarity without losing warmth.

The details finally belonged together, and Mothership began to feel like a real place.

The Finished website

A warm and supportive network for Catholic moms.

Mothership is a site where Catholic mothers of all backgrounds can connect, get support, and offer guidance.

connection at every stage

Mothers can find mentorship, companionship, and community shaped around where they are in life and the kind of support they need.

support that's easy to find

Resources are organized around the realities of motherhood, making it easier to find practical help, guidance, and opportunities to connect.

help goes both ways

The site makes it just as natural to offer support as to ask for it, giving mothers ways to share their time, experience, and resources with one another.

a welcoming place to return to

Warm photography, simple floral forms, and clear navigation bring the system together in an experience designed to feel useful, familiar, and human.

interactive prototype

Experience Mothership below.

Explore how Mothership brings support, resources, and community together in one welcoming place.

Final reflection

Finding warmth without losing clarity.

Gutsy began as a way to help people track the many factors surrounding chronic illness. Designing it revealed a more important challenge: helping people recognize meaningful patterns without overwhelming them or overstating what the data can prove.

The biggest challenge was balancing Mothership’s emotional identity with the practical needs of a resource-rich community.