OwnU — Designing an AI fitness coach for 50,000+ users
Senior Product Designer and App/Product Lead, responsible for end-to-end UX and AI experience design.
OwnU is the leading workout platform for women in Scandinavia and the US, with a focus on pre- and post-pregnant women. After three years in startup mode the company entered scale-up phase, requiring a full redesign of the core app experience with a focus on global growth and deep AI integration.
The core of the product was an AI fitness coach — not a static workout generator, but a system that learned and adapted over time. The AI personalised training plans based on each user's physical conditions, training history, goals, and preferences. For pre- and post-pregnant users this was especially critical: the AI needed to adapt exercises to the user's current physical state, energy levels, and recovery stage — not just serve generic content.
My job was to design the entire AI coach experience: how the AI communicated with users, how it motivated them, how it surfaced personalised recommendations, and how users could steer or override the AI's suggestions. I also used Claude Code to build functional prototypes that simulated the actual LLM-driven interaction logic — validating AI behaviour in real user flows before any engineering commitment.
Key UX challenges included designing for AI output variability, building feedback loops where user responses shaped future recommendations, and making the AI feel like a coach rather than an algorithm.
Results