(01) About
Settle.in
A supportive mobile app designed to ease relocation: reducing stress, building community, and tracking adaptation progress through simple micro-actions.
Product goal
To make the adaptation process manageable and predictable. I help users integrate into a new country by lowering social barriers, structuring everyday tasks, and providing emotional support.
(02) User research
Step 1 - User research
Conducted desk research across expat forums (Vinsky Forum, Telegram channels, community websites, and other reviews) to map real user behaviors, pain points, and existing workarounds.
Community as a core resource: Live communication and peer support from fellow relocants are top priorities for successful adaptation.
Need for positive reinforcement: Adaptation is a marathon. Users need to track and validate "small wins" (micro-achievements) to sustain morale.
Tool fragmentation and fatigue: Users bounce between dozens of single-purpose apps and chaotic chats. Existing market solutions only solve narrow, isolated tasks.
The "Relocant-to-Relocant" specialist gap: Finding effective mental support is broken; out-of-context therapists fail to understand the unique psychological triggers of immigration.
(03) User research
User Behavior and Pain Points
After analyzing current user journeys, I mapped out what works, what adds value, and where the friction lies.
This helped define the core Job-to-be-Done (JTBD): When I relocate to a new country, I want a single, safe ecosystem where I can find my tribe, make friends, beat loneliness, and navigate the transition with care
(04) Competitors analysis
Step 2: Competitive Analysis
I evaluated six key competitors in the space: Headspace, Expat.com, Aqee, InterNations, Vinsky Forum, and Telegram expat communities.
The core insight: Every competitor solves an isolated pain point, but none address the user journey holistically.
- Headspace provides a safe environment to reduce anxiety but offers no way to build a community.
- Another competitor focuses strictly on local cultural integration but fails to help users decompress or find their tribe.
- Aqee streamlines relocation paperwork and even touches on meetups, but completely ignores the mental health aspect.
- Telegram Communities help expats network and make friends but do nothing to alleviate chronic relocation stress.
(06) Hypothesis and CJM
Step 3: Hypothesis formulation
Drawing from the research insights, I formulated the following core product hypothesis:
If we break down the overwhelming cultural adaptation process into a safe, interactive track of micro-steps, pair it with relevant peer communities, and embed an intuitive mood-tracking framework, we can drastically reduce expat anxiety and enable seamless societal integration.
Step 4 — Customer Journey Map
Based on the behavioral data, I engineered a highly intentional, five-stage CJM:
(08) Creating design concept
Step 6: Design Concept
When developing the visual language, I anchored the design in three core emotions: warmth, gentleness, and friendliness. Based on the user analysis, it was crucial to create a design concept that doesn’t just inform, but actively provides emotional support.
(09) UI design
Step 7: UI Design — Onboarding
To create a gentle entry for the user, I designed an empathetic, conversational flow. This instantly rewards them with personalized feedback, showing their current adaptation phase and validating that they aren’t alone. The Result: Establishing immediate product trust and significantly lowering user anxiety.
(10) UI Design
Hero screen
When designing the main screen, the primary goal was to reduce cognitive load and provide a structured daily compass for the expat. Every design decision here serves a specific purpose:
- Daily Focus: Anchoring the user in the present moment.
- Emotional Check-in: A quick, safe space to evaluate their well-being.
- Finding a Tribe: Seamless discovery of interest-based communities.
- Decompression: Encouraging low-friction micro-actions that help the user step back from the chaos, exhale, and relieve stress.
(11) UI design
UI Design: Mood tracking flow
The Mood Logging screen addresses one of the app’s core objectives: providing a safe, judgment-free space for users to pause and ask themselves, "How am I feeling right now?"
Meanwhile, the Mood Analytics screen delivers a clear, visual answer to the bigger questions: "How am I really doing in this new country? Are things getting better? Is my stress finally fading?" This seamless flow allows users to effortlessly track their emotional baseline over time.
Meanwhile, the Mood Analytics screen delivers a clear, visual answer to the bigger questions: "How am I really doing in this new country? Are things getting better? Is my stress finally fading?" This seamless flow allows users to effortlessly track their emotional baseline over time.
(12) UI design
UI Design: Event and meetup screens
Users can seamlessly filter and discover local meetups tailored to their specific interests. The interface provides upfront transparency on essential details (date, time, and location), allowing users to quickly assess if an event fits their schedule and RSVP with a single tap.
Crucially, the detailed event screen is engineered to overcome common social barriers and anxiety. By clearly outlining the host’s background, the exact agenda, and the expected crowd, it directly answers the user’s biggest unspoken questions: "What exactly will we be doing, and will I fit in?"
Crucially, the detailed event screen is engineered to overcome common social barriers and anxiety. By clearly outlining the host’s background, the exact agenda, and the expected crowd, it directly answers the user’s biggest unspoken questions: "What exactly will we be doing, and will I fit in?"
(13) UI design
UI Design: Article and content screens
The primary objective of this section is to alleviate user stress and feelings of isolation by connecting them with the lived experiences of fellow expats. The design logic is built on three core pillars:
Smart Filtering: Leveraging user onboarding data, the algorithm automatically ranks articles from highly relevant to general. The filter architecture is strictly mapped to the four core pain points of the immigration journey.
Transparency & Trust: Within each article, users can view a detailed author profile (including their relocation tenure, country, and city). This humanizes the content, making it relatable and highly credible.
Social Engagement Tools: Integrating comment sections and offering a frictionless way to directly connect with authors or fellow readers transforms a static reading experience into a supportive community environment.
(14) UI design
UI Design: The progress screen
This screen directly addresses the user’s core underlying anxiety: "Where am I right now, and am I actually moving forward?"
Interactive Phase Tracker: Visualizes the current stage of the immigration journey. Instead of navigating endless uncertainty, users see a clear, structured timeline. It reframes their current emotional state as a recognizable, temporary phase with a definitive beginning and end.
Achievement Validation: A dedicated "Milestones Completed" module visually anchors their progress, securely tracking finished micro-steps and closed deadlines.
Mood Retrospective: A 7-day emotional summary is overlaid directly onto the progress map. This empowers users to correlate their mood dynamics with their actual behaviors, helping them identify and intercept emotional dips early on.
(15) UI design
UI Design: The saved content hub
Serving as the user's personal ecosystem, this screen consolidates saved meetups, articles, and connections into a single centralized space. This directly eliminates the friction of managing fragmented data scattered across multiple different apps.
Quick Filters (Meetings, Articles, People): Enable instant content retrieval and significantly reduce cognitive load.
Direct Messaging: The "Message" CTA opens a direct chat with event hosts or article authors, specifically engineered to lower the barrier of social anxiety during initial outreach.
Frictionless RSVP: An active "Join" button allows users to confirm their attendance directly from their bookmarks, empowering them to effortlessly manage their social calendar.
(16) UI design
UI Design: User profile screen
The Profile acts as a digital identity hub, showcasing the individual’s personal background and relocation story while providing direct contact points for seamless communication. Providing this context upfront significantly reduces the social friction and anxiety of reaching out to strangers. By humanizing the digital experience, it empowers expats to bond, form organic micro-communities, and effortlessly find their tribe of like-minded people.
(17) Итоги
Ideas for product development
Next step — a moderated usability test with 5−7 participants from the target audience.
Scenario: "You've recently relocated to a new city. Find an interest-based meetup nearby and sign up for it this week."
Check:
Check:
- whether the participant completed the task without hints (yes/no)
- at which step, if any, hesitation occurred
- how long it took from opening the app to a confirmed sign-up
- subjective rating on a 1−5 scale: "it was clear where to tap"
Next scenario: "You want to log your mood for the first time today. Find the mood block on the home screen and mark it."
Check:
Check:
- whether the participant completed the task without hints (yes/no)
- whether it’s clear that step 2 allows adding more detailed information
Scenario: "Open the app and choose one of today’s suggested micro-actions."
Check:
Check:
- how quickly the user can locate the action cards on the home screen
- whether they follow through to the final step: reading an article or signing up for an event
