Nice Shit
Product Design · UI/UX · 2022 · 11/21Making gut-health tracking feel like self-care, not illness management
- Client
- Self-initiated
- Industry
- Consumer health / medical device
- Service
- Product UI/UX + brand
- Timeline
- A few weeks
Goal
A self-initiated concept: a domestic device that reads gut health through routine testing, paired with nutrition guidance for everyone, not just the sick. I wanted one of the most consequential, least-discussed areas of health to become a daily habit people would actually keep — behind a name that says the quiet part out loud.
Challenge
Gut health is consequential and barely discussed. Clinical options exist, but they’re cold, expensive, and stigmatizing by association. Daily digestive tracking had to feel like self-care rather than illness management — approachable enough for someone without a diagnosis, honest enough for someone with one.
Outcome
It reaches past the clinic — approachable enough for the merely curious, honest enough for the chronically ill, and the same daily habit for both.
This is a product I wished existed while living with a disease no one wanted to name — years of symptoms doctors dismissed and society preferred unspoken. Nice Shit is that home device: it reads your gut health through routine testing, with nutrition guidance for everyone. The name is not an accident.
What Nice Shit is
- A home device that reads gut health via routine testing
- Nutrition guidance for everyone — not just the sick
- A daily habit, not a clinical event
Nice Shit knows exactly what it is — and that clarity freed the visual system to be warm, irreverent, and inviting rather than defensively clinical. The name does the work most health brands spend a fortune avoiding: it says the quiet part out loud, so the design never has to apologize for the subject.
What the name unlocked
- A product that knows exactly what it is
- Warm, irreverent, inviting — not clinical
- Permission to say the quiet part out loud
- Approachable for the curious, honest for the diagnosed
Device and app were designed in parallel, with the app as the primary interface: a daily check-in that closes the loop between what you eat and how you feel. Nutrition guidance was designed in from the start, because the goal was behavior change, not data capture.
The system
- Home device reads gut health via routine testing
- App as the primary interface — a daily check-in
- Closes the loop: what you eat → how you feel
- Nutrition guidance built in from the start
Make a stigmatized daily habit feel like care and it stops belonging only to the sick. Nice Shit lands as the same routine for two people who’d never share a waiting room — the merely curious and the chronically ill — without talking down to either.
What it proves
- Stigmatized care can feel like self-care
- One product for the curious and the chronically ill
- Behavior change, not just data capture