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Chapter 5: In full bloom — FibreTempo turns everyday fibre choices into a Living Ecosystem that grows with consistent habits
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Today view: daily fibre, plant variety and practical next steps come together in one calm, visual experience.
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Living Story: FibreTempo turns weekly habits into habitats, plants and clear next growth moves.
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Progress is preserved: quieter days never erase what you’ve grown, reinforcing a non-punitive approach to consistency.
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Discover: browse fibre-rich foods by category, fibre content and the habitat each choice helps grow.
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Personalised onboarding adapts guidance to what the user wants to notice first, without changing the core fibre goal.
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Your ecosystem is ready: a personalised starting range, long-term goal and realistic first move built from familiar foods.
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FibreTempo app icon — a growing seed and leaf symbol representing small fibre choices becoming long-term growth.
Inspiration
Most nutrition apps turn healthy eating into numbers, targets and streaks. FibreTempo started with a different question:
What if improving your fibre habits could feel more like growing something than tracking something?
Building a better routine is rarely about having one perfect day. It is about gradually eating a wider variety of fibre-rich foods and creating habits that can survive real life.
That idea became FibreTempo — an iOS app that transforms everyday fibre choices into a living, evolving ecosystem.
What it does
FibreTempo helps people build better fibre habits through food logging, discovery and visual progress.
Instead of reducing progress to a single number, the app turns different types of fibre-rich foods into distinct habitats including Berry Grove, Leafy Terrace, Legume Valley, Wholegrain Meadow, Orchard Canopy and Seed Sanctuary.
As the user's habits develop, their ecosystem grows with them.
The experience includes:
- A personalised onboarding journey based on the fibre-rich foods someone already eats
- A daily view for logging food, fibre progress and plant variety
- Quick Add for making everyday logging fast
- Food discovery organised around different fibre-rich sources
- A Living Ecosystem that evolves over time
- Habitats that reflect variety across different food groups
- Progress views designed to show evidence of improvement over time
- Favourites and personalised food choices
- A deliberately non-punitive approach to consistency
One of the most important design decisions was that quiet days do not kill the garden or erase progress. FibreTempo is designed around returning, continuing and growing — not maintaining a perfect streak.
Design
The Living Ecosystem is at the heart of FibreTempo.
Rather than adding gamification on top of a conventional nutrition tracker, I wanted the visual experience itself to communicate progress.
The garden develops as the user's journey progresses, while individual habitats give different fibre-rich food groups their own visual identity. Imagery, motion, depth and transitions are used to make something as ordinary as eating more fibre feel tangible and rewarding.
The ecosystem is a behavioural metaphor rather than a literal representation of the gut or microbiome.
That principle shaped the wider interface too: progress should feel calm rather than clinical, encouraging rather than judgemental, and useful without overwhelming the user with data.
The goal was not simply to make fibre tracking look better. It was to design an experience where the interface itself gives people a reason to return.
How I built it
FibreTempo is built as a native iOS experience using Swift and SwiftUI, with the interface developed and refined screen by screen in Xcode.
RevenueCat handles FibreTempo’s subscription infrastructure and entitlements. The app is free to download, but full use requires a paid subscription, available monthly or yearly. The yearly plan includes a seven-day free trial, and there is no separate free tier.
The app is intentionally account-free at launch, with its core personal data stored locally on the user’s device.
I also built FibreTempo publicly throughout Ship-a-ton, sharing design decisions, development progress, changes, setbacks and the process of turning the original idea into an App Store product.
Challenges and lessons
One of the biggest challenges was balancing usefulness with restraint.
Nutrition products can quickly become dashboards full of metrics. FibreTempo still needs to give people meaningful information about their fibre habits, but I did not want every interaction to feel like entering data into a spreadsheet.
The challenge became deciding what information genuinely helps someone take their next step — and what can stay out of the way.
Building the Living Ecosystem presented a similar challenge. It needed to be more than decoration, but it also could not imply scientific claims that the app cannot make. Treating it as a behavioural metaphor gave me a much clearer design principle.
The biggest lesson from building FibreTempo has been that progress does not always need to be represented by pressure.
Sometimes the interface itself can make someone want to come back.
Awards entered
- RevenueCat Design Award
- #BuildInPublic Award
- Nutrition & Healthy Eating Influencer Award — Abbey’s Kitchen
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