Madhuka De Silva
Context (Backstory)
Manifesty.life began as a deeply personal project. My husband and I designed and developed the app using the AI-assisted tool, Lovable AI to support our own manifestation practices and goal-setting routines. At the time, we were not trying to solve a broadly defined market problem, we were building something for ourselves, grounded in lived experience rather than formalised research or early-stage UX artefacts.
Since we had a clear shared vision of what we wanted to use, we intentionally skipped conventional design steps such as sketching, wireframing, and upfront user research. Instead, we moved directly into building, using AI to rapidly translate our ideas into a functional product. This approach allowed us to explore speed, experimentation, and intuition as valid design drivers within a constrained, self-defined context.
As the product evolved, we began to recognise its relevance beyond ourselves. This shift from a personal tool to a potentially shared experience is what reframed the work as a product design challenge rather than a purely personal build. In this process, my role naturally extended beyond co-founder into Product Designer, shaping flows, interactions, and features while negotiating the opportunities and limitations of AI-led development.
Manifesty.life therefore represents a non-traditional UX journey: one that started with lived need, leveraged AI as a creative and technical collaborator, and only later raised questions of scalability, usability, and broader user value.
Problem
We have been creating vision boards for over six years. Manifestation and intentional goal-setting have been a daily practice for us, something that consistently shaped how we planned our time and futures. However, at the end of each year, we noticed a recurring gap. Even though our vision board was always right in front of us, some goals were left unaddressed, while others faded from visibility altogether.
Through reflection and brainstorming, we realised that the issue was not motivation, but tracking. We were visualising and planning, but not consistently capturing progress, patterns, or shifts over time in a way that felt meaningful to us.
While there are many existing tools for goal tracking, note-taking, and to-do lists, none fully aligned with how we wanted to engage with manifestation and long-term goal setting. We spent time exploring and experimenting with several of these tools, which helped us clarify what felt missing for us and what kind of experience we wanted to build.
Competitor Analysis
The table illustrates how Manifesty.life integrates intention, tracking, reflection, and reminders into a single flow, addressing gaps left by fragmented or setup-heavy tools.
Our Needs
1) Guided manifestation rituals
Sometimes we knew exactly what we wanted to write; other times we didn’t. We needed gentle guidance alongside free-form writing, with manifestations stored in one consistent place that we could always return to and be reminded of over time.
2) Lightweight reminders, not calendar overload
We didn’t want a full calendar setup with reminders for every task, which quickly becomes overwhelming and easy to ignore. One intentional reminder in the morning felt sufficient ideally arriving where we already check daily, such as email offering a moment to reflect on the day ahead rather than manage notifications.
3) Goal tracking connected to manifestation
We wanted to track goals in relation to our manifestations, while also accounting for everyday life-admin tasks that don’t neatly fit into long-term goals. Importantly, we didn’t want to manage multiple tools, so we needed a single list that could hold both intention-driven goals and practical tasks without separating the experience.
Lovable AI (App Development Tool)
We used Lovable AI to design and develop the initial version of Manifesty.life. As mentioned earlier, we did not follow a conventional user research or UX process. This felt unfamiliar and at times uncomfortable given my background and PhD in user-centred research. However, I intentionally leaned into experimenting with this emerging technology to understand its possibilities and limitations.
While AI enabled rapid translation of ideas into a functional and visually polished product, its capabilities were limited when it came to understanding user experience more holistically. Several gaps became evident where human design judgement was essential.
For example, accessibility considerations were often overlooked, even basic issues such as sufficient colour contrast on buttons required manual intervention. Refer image of 'Sign in' button.
User Pool and Moderated Testing
As an early-stage product, large-scale user recruitment was not feasible. We therefore conducted guerrilla-style moderated testing with five participants, aligning with Norman’s principle [A,B] that testing with a small number of users can surface the majority of usability issues, while acknowledging Faulkner’s [C] argument for broader sampling. Given budget and time constraints, we prioritised iterative testing with small groups as a pragmatic approach.
The participant group included:
-
Users new to manifestation practices
-
Users familiar with manifestation concepts
Each participant was asked to complete three tasks:
-
Create a manifestation
-
Create a goal related to the manifestation
-
Create a task linked to the goal and mark it as complete
While completing these tasks, participants were encouraged to freely explore the app, follow their curiosity, and move through the interface naturally rather than strictly adhering to task instructions. This approach allowed us to observe both goal-directed behaviour and unprompted interactions, surfacing usability and flow-related insights early in the design.
A - https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/
B - https://www.nngroup.com/articles/5-test-users-qual-quant/
C - https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03195514
Observations and Insights
(Qualitative feedback and Hotjar Quantitative analytics)
Observation 1: Users navigated to the Vision Board instead of creating a Manifestation
Hotjar heatmaps and journey recordings (refer above figure) showed that first-time users frequently clicked into the Vision Board immediately after signing in, rather than starting with creating a Manifestation. This behaviour was also echoed in moderated sessions, where participants gravitated toward visually prominent or familiar-looking elements instead of following the intended flow.
Insight:
While the daily dashboard and vision board were central to our ongoing use, they were not the most appropriate entry point for first-time users. Given the onboarding tasks and users’ unfamiliarity with the app’s structure, loading the dashboard first created competing points of attention and obscured the core action: creating a manifestation. This revealed a mismatch between an experience optimised for returning users and the needs of first-time users.
Design Response:
We propose a redesign of the post sign-in experience that prioritises manifestation creation for new users, reducing the visual prominence of the Vision Board during onboarding. The dashboard flow is reframed as a secondary, return-state experience, with clearer cues introduced to guide first-time users toward creating their first manifestation before exploring other features.
Observation 2: Users attempted to skip or exit guided manifestation prompt
Some frequently tried to skip steps, go back, or explore alternative options while moving through the guided manifestation prompts (refer above hotjar heatmap). They explicitly expressed a desire to write freely rather than follow a structured, prompt-based flow.
Insight:This behaviour indicated that guidance is not universally desirable. While prompts can support users who are new or uncertain, they can feel restrictive for users who already have clarity or established practices. A single, mandatory guided flow risks excluding users with different levels of familiarity and confidence.
Design Response:
We introduce two parallel creation pathways (refer image below): a guided, prompt-based manifestation flow and a free-form writing option. This allows users to choose the level of structure that suits them in the moment, supporting both exploratory and experienced manifestation practices without forcing a single approach.
Observation 3: Users expected a direct pathway from manifestation to goals
Move analysis and moderated observations showed that users made multiple, unnecessary navigational movements after creating a manifestation (below image on left side). Several participants paused or questioned what to do next, expecting a clear pathway to translate the manifestation into actionable goals rather than having to manually navigate to the Goals tab.
Insight:The absence of an explicit transition from manifestation to goal creation introduced friction and cognitive overhead. Users naturally interpreted manifestation as a starting point and expected the system to guide them toward the next meaningful action, rather than requiring them to infer the workflow.
Design Response:
We introduced a direct pathway from manifestation creation to goal creation, offering two options (below image on right side): manual goal creation or highlighting key elements directly from the manifestation text to generate goals. This reinforces a logical progression from intention to action and reduces unnecessary navigation.
