I wanted to make my habit tracker feel more alive
About six months ago, I started thinking about how to make Dayrise feel more alive and create an emotional connection with users.
There are hundreds of habit trackers, so I wanted to create something different. I didn’t want a character like other apps. I wanted something that felt natural to the experience.
The answer was right there in the name: sunrise. It creates a simple idea: complete your habits and watch the sun rise with your progress.
The sunrise metaphor is a nice way to create emotion without adding a mascot or noisy gamification. A useful test might be what happens after a missed day: let the visual reset gently, then show a small “restart” moment rather than punishing the streak. Do users say the sense of progress is motivating on its own, or does the app need reminders to bring them back?
Thank you! The sunrise actually starts over every day, so there's no streak to break. If you miss a day, you're simply back at the very beginning of the sunrise and start again. I'm only starting to collect feedback, so I can't say yet whether the sense of progress is enough on its own. That's one of the things I want to find out.
Love that framing — if the sunrise resets every day, there's nothing to "break," so a missed day costs you a morning instead of your whole record. Curious how you'll measure whether that sense of progress is enough on its own: are you watching something like whether people come back the day after they miss, or leaning more on qualitative feedback from early users? Either way, nice instinct to test it before bolting streaks back on.
A bit of both. I’m collecting feedback from users, and I also have analytics set up in the app to track retention. I haven’t set up tracking for what happens after a missed day yet, but that’s something I plan to add over time.
That’s a solid mix—user feedback gives you the why, while analytics helps validate the retention picture. Adding missed-day follow-through later should make the picture even clearer.
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?