Fieldnotes

When Health Has to Fit Into a Glance

Sometimes the smallest spaces reveal the most, a glance, a signal, a rhythm to follow.

Patricia Bedoya

11 Dec 2025 • 3 min read

I don’t know why, but when I think about these new widgets, my mind always goes back to an ordinary morning: coffee in hand, the Apple Watch buzzing, my wrist lifting almost on autopilot. And there it was, one of the first prototypes. Tiny, almost shy, as if it were asking for permission to exist. And yet it said something about me… before I did anything at all.

That small moment made it clear that designing for these spaces wasn’t going to be simple.

Figma canvas showing multiple FitWoody widget families for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, including activity, consistency, streak, and annual goal designs arranged in groups. — Whenever I look at this Figma board, I’m reminded that these widgets didn’t arrive fully formed. They emerged slowly, family by family, each one asking a different question about how health should appear in the smallest possible space. Before they lived on a wrist or a Lock Screen, they lived here, half-ideas, experiments, and attempts to say something true with almost no room at all.

Designing for the iPhone has rules. But designing for the Lock Screen, the Smart Stack, the Apple Watch complications, especially the microscopic ones, is a completely different kind of challenge. You design for instants. For microseconds of attention. For the moments when life briefly looks your way.

And in that lack of control, you have to decide what truth can fit into two centimeters of space.

Health is complex. Motivation is complex. And yet a widget can’t show complexity; it can only suggest it. It can only offer a gesture. That’s why these first widgets focus on movement and long-term goals: because they’re the parts that can live without knowing everything about you. Even so, they still had to feel human. They still had to be honest.

Two Apple Watch Ultra screens displaying FitWoody complications for consistency, daily activity, and energy-related metrics, shown on different watch faces with orange bands. — The Apple Watch complications were probably the biggest challenge not because of their size, but because they appear whenever they want. Designing for the wrist means designing for moments you don’t control: a quick glance, a rushed gesture, a tiny window of attention. Each of these complications had to say something real… or say nothing at all.

A small blue grid can say more about your month than any chart. A tiny number on your wrist can remind you of an intention you’ve been trying to recover. But the thing that struck me most is something simple: a widget doesn’t speak when you search for it; it speaks when it appears. And that makes it deeply emotional.

But the most important, and the hardest, part is still ahead.

Because real health doesn’t begin with your steps, or your calories, or even your consistency. It begins with your rest. With how you wake up. With how your energy shifts throughout the day.

iPhones displaying FitWoody Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets, including activity tracking, consistency calendar, streaks, and adaptive daily goals on green-themed backgrounds. — The iPhone widgets felt like learning a new dialect of the product: the same ideas, expressed in a different tone. The Home Screen asks for clarity; the Lock Screen asks for immediacy. Seeing them together makes that contrast visible two entry points into your day that don’t require opening anything at all.

The next widgets will be about sleep. And once they arrive, FitWoody will be able to adjust hour by hour to how you feel, not just what you do. It will be able to say: you can push a bit more today or you don’t need to force anything today. It will finally be able to accompany you, not just inform you.

All of this work, the technical limits, the frustrations, the attempts, has been training for the moment we get there: to a system that understands your day isn’t linear, that your body changes, that your energy breathes.

Because in the end, designing health isn’t about designing screens.

It’s about designing how we flow through the day.

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