Circlly
Co-founding and designing a privacy-first safety check-in app where one tap delivers peace of mind: no location tracking, no awkward texts, just a simple signal that someone is okay.
- Role
- Co-Founder & Product Designer
- Timeline
- 2024 - Present
- Platform
- iOS & Android (PWA)
- Year
- 2024
The Problem
There is a specific anxiety that comes with waiting to hear from someone. A friend who left late at night. A family member driving a long route. A partner in an unfamiliar city. You do not want to track them. You do not want to call every twenty minutes. You just want to know they are okay.
Existing solutions make this harder than it needs to be. Sharing live location feels invasive and permanent. Group chats create noise. A direct call interrupts. WhatsApp status is passive and unreliable. There was no tool designed specifically for the moment of "just let me know you got there safe", a one-tap check-in that asks for nothing except a response.
Circlly was built for that exact moment. A user requests a check-in from a friend. The friend receives a single notification with three options: I am okay, Running late, or Need help. One tap. The requester is notified immediately. No location data is ever collected. No ongoing tracking. The interaction starts and ends with that exchange.
As co-founder, my job was to design a product that felt as simple as its concept, and that was harder than it sounds. Every additional feature or screen was a risk to the core promise of radical simplicity.
My Role
I co-founded Circlly and led all product design from the ground up. I defined the product philosophy, designed every screen across onboarding and the core app experience, built the design system, and wrote all UX copy. The core design challenge was maintaining radical simplicity across every surface. Every screen had to earn its place by asking: does this make the check-in faster, clearer, or more trustworthy? If the answer was no, it did not ship.
Team
Co-Founder and Designer (me), Co-Founder (engineering lead). PWA built with React Native and Supabase.
Research & Discovery
Before any wireframe existed, I needed to understand the emotional texture of the problem. When do people feel anxious about someone's safety? What do they currently do? Why do existing tools fail them at that exact moment?
Location sharing feels like surveillance, not reassurance
Every person interviewed who had used Find My Friends or Google Maps location sharing described the same discomfort: it felt permanent and one-sided. Sharing your live location to reassure someone for one journey meant they could see your location indefinitely. The anxiety of being tracked outweighed the reassurance it was supposed to provide. People wanted a signal, not a data stream.
The check-in request is a social act, not a technical one
Asking "let me know when you get home" is not a feature request. It is an expression of care. The product had to honor that. Any friction in the requesting flow or the response flow would break the social contract of the interaction. A five-step check-in request would feel like surveillance. A one-tap response that required an account would create a barrier exactly when someone needed to send a quick reassurance.
Trust is established before the first check-in, not during it
The research showed that people needed to feel safe in the app before they would use it for something that mattered. The onboarding flow had to build trust explicitly, not through a privacy policy wall, but through design choices. The Trust Phrase mechanic emerged from this insight: a short, memorable phrase generated during setup that a user can share with their circle as proof that a request is really from them and not a spoofed notification.
Three response options is the maximum. Not four, not two.
Testing different response configurations showed a clear pattern. Two options (okay / not okay) created false positives because "Running late" does not mean "Need help." Four or more options created decision paralysis: people wanted to respond instantly, not deliberate. Three options (I am okay, Running late, Need help) covered every real scenario with zero ambiguity and required no thought to select.
The overdue state is the most critical design moment
When someone does not respond to a check-in by the set timer, the app enters an Overdue state. This is the moment where the product either holds its promise or breaks it. The Overdue state needed to be visually distinct and emotionally calibrated: urgent enough to notice, calm enough not to escalate anxiety before the user has decided how to respond. Getting the color, copy, and notification tone right for Overdue took more iteration than any other state in the product.
Key Decisions
The Question
Should Circlly collect any location data at all, even optional, even with permission?
The Decision
No location data. Ever. This is a product principle, not a feature toggle.
Making location optional would have undermined the entire product promise. "No location tracking" is not a privacy setting, it is what Circlly is. The moment location becomes optional, it becomes expected, and then it becomes the primary feature. The product had to be designed as if location did not exist as a concept, forcing every safety signal to come from the check-in exchange itself rather than from passive tracking.
The Question
What is the Trust Phrase and why does it exist?
The Decision
A short auto-generated memorable phrase set during onboarding that users can share with their circle to verify that a check-in request is genuinely from them.
Without any form of verification, a malicious actor could send a fake check-in request from a spoofed number or account to track someone's response patterns. The Trust Phrase solves this without adding friction to the normal check-in flow. Most users will never need it. But its existence during onboarding signals that Circlly has thought carefully about edge cases, and that signal builds trust before the first real check-in happens.
The Question
Should the home screen show a map, a list, or something else?
The Decision
A clean circle list with status badges. Safe in teal, Pending in amber, Overdue in red. No map, no timeline.
A map would have implied location tracking even if nothing was being tracked. A timeline added cognitive load for what should be an instant scan. The list with three distinct badge states lets a user open the app and understand the status of everyone in their circle in under two seconds. The status is the interface. Everything else is secondary.
Flow Diagram
The Question
What should the navigation structure be?
The Decision
Four-tab bottom nav: Home, Circle, Alerts, Profile. The check-in FAB floats above the nav on the Home tab only.
Keeping the primary action as a floating button rather than a tab meant it could not be confused with navigation. The FAB on Home is the only place in the app from which a check-in can be requested. This constraint makes the flow learnable in the first session: there is only one place to go to start a check-in, and it is always visible when you are on the home screen.
The Question
How should the design system feel: clinical and minimal, or warm and human?
The Decision
Warm and human. Deep navy primary, teal accent, warm off-white surfaces, Plus Jakarta Sans typography, generous rounded corners throughout.
Safety apps often default to a clinical blue-and-white aesthetic that reads as emergency services or medical tech. Circlly is not for emergencies, it is for the quiet anxiety of everyday care between people who trust each other. The design system needed to feel like that relationship: warm, considered, and calm. Deep navy and teal read as trustworthy without being cold. Rounded corners and generous spacing made every screen feel approachable rather than urgent.
Final Design
The final Circlly design covers the complete onboarding flow, the core check-in interaction loop, the home screen with all status states, circle management, alerts, and the profile screen. All screens use the deep navy and teal design system with Plus Jakarta Sans throughout.
All Screens
Key Flows
Onboarding: from splash to first check-in ready
Outcomes
1
tap to respond to any check-in
The entire product is designed around this constraint
0
location data collected, ever
Product principle, not a feature toggle
14
screens designed across onboarding and core app
Splash, login, sign up, username, emergency contact, trust phrase, home, request, response, circle, alerts, forgot password, profile, overdue state
3
response options, the exact right number
I am okay, Running late, Need help. Tested 2 and 4. Three was the answer.
What I Learned
Circlly taught me that simplicity is not a design choice you make at the end by removing things. It is a constraint you set at the beginning and defend at every step. Every feature proposal during this project went through the same filter: does this make the check-in faster, clearer, or more trustworthy? Most ideas failed that test. Removing them was not hard once the filter existed. The Trust Phrase was the most unexpected design win. It started as a security edge case, something we included because it was the right thing to do, not because users would notice it. But in the onboarding flow, it became a trust signal that landed harder than any copy we wrote. Users who set up the Trust Phrase understood in that moment that Circlly had thought carefully about what could go wrong. That understanding carried forward into how they used the rest of the product. If I were starting again, I would have done user testing on the response screen earlier. The shift from four options to three happened later than it should have: the evidence was there in the first round of observation, but it took a second round to act on it. The best design decisions in this project were the ones made fastest when the evidence was clearest.
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