Why "Designed for Everyone" Means Designed for No One

It was a Tuesday in October. I had 47 unread texts, a work deadline that had quietly migrated from "this week" to "right now," and about nine minutes before I had to leave the house. I opened a meditation app I'd been paying for all year and picked the track called Calm in the Storm because, you know, on theme.

The first thing the narrator said was: "Find a quiet space in your home where you won't be disturbed."

I closed the app.

I'm not dragging the app. It's a good app. Millions of people love it and I'm genuinely happy for them. My problem wasn't with that specific one — it's that this same moment keeps happening. Some wellness tool, some gratitude template, some article called 10 Morning Habits to Transform Your Life. And within the first sixty seconds it becomes clear: this was built for a woman whose life I don't live.

Then I always do the same thing. I close the app, feel a little embarrassed, and tell myself I should be the kind of woman who has a quiet space. That I'm the one who's doing this wrong.

I'm not. And if this is you, neither are you.

Think about the last three years. How many wellness apps have you downloaded? Five? Eight? Each one took 20-40 minutes to set up. Each one asked you to build a new habit around its design, not your life. Each one left a tiny residue when you quit — the small, quiet thought that maybe you're just bad at this. That's a few hours of your time. And eight quiet dents in your self-trust. And the answer is somehow always supposed to be "try harder next year."

The "everyone" problem

When a company says their product is "designed for everyone," what they usually mean is: we built it for the user we assumed, and we hoped it would stretch to cover the rest of you.

This isn't a conspiracy. It's just how design works. You can't design for no one. So when a team starts building, they carry an image in their head — sometimes articulated, sometimes not — of who they're building for. Everything flows from that image. The copy, the onboarding flow, the illustrations, the notification timing, the default settings, the pricing tier.

The assumed user in most mainstream wellness apps has things a lot of us don't. Uninterrupted mornings. A partner who can take the kids for twenty minutes. A job that doesn't drain her identity before 10 AM. A family history that doesn't require three generations of context. No racial trauma that needs to be woven into the mindfulness practice. No relatives who will call during "her mindfulness window" and cannot be ignored because family is family.

That's not a villain. That's just the default. But when everything gets built around that default, a lot of us end up doing a mental translation every time we open the app. Reading a prompt and editing it in our heads. Swapping nouns. Skipping the meditation about our relationship with our mothers because it'll open something this app doesn't know how to hold.

Eventually the translation gets tiring. And we stop opening the app.

Then we blame ourselves for quitting. That's the part that stings.

The wellness industry has a retention problem. It isn't always a willpower problem. Sometimes the tool was never built for the life the user is actually living.

Then they blame the user

The wellness industry has a retention problem that nobody in the industry loves to discuss. Published research on mobile mental health apps has found median 15-day retention rates around 3-4% — meaning fewer than 1 in 20 people who download are still using two weeks later. Engagement tanks after week one, and most paid users don't renew after the first month.

The industry explains this as willpower. "Users didn't build the habit." New year, new commitment, buy the annual plan, try again.

Sometimes that's true. Sometimes you bought the app in January with real intent and January-you was a different person than February-you, and that's just how it goes. But a lot of the time, it's something else. It's a design problem that companies find cheaper to call a user problem.

Women of color clock this faster than most, I think. When you've spent your whole life being told that the thing that didn't fit you was actually something wrong with you, you develop a certain radar for it. A lot of us quietly walked away from wellness apps without making a scene, because we'd already done the calculus: this isn't me, this is them, and I'm not going to spend energy arguing about it on the internet.

What "built for someone specific" actually looks like

Here's the shift: when you design for one specific person, you can get honest.

You can write the actual prompts she needs. You can name the thing she's carrying instead of dancing around it. You don't have to couch everything in universal language that won't scare off a demographic who isn't even going to use this anyway.

For We Unearthed, the specific person is a woman of color who's carrying a lot. Maybe she's first-gen. Maybe she prays. Maybe she used to pray and she's figuring out what she believes now. Maybe she has small kids. Maybe she's caring for a parent and small kids at once. Maybe she's single and childfree and people keep asking her when she's going to "settle down" like that's not a whole sentence on its own. Maybe she's code-switching all day. Probably she's tired of being called resilient when what she actually needs is rest.

Once you know that's who you're designing for, the choices get simpler. The ritual is five minutes because that's what she has. The prompts don't ask her to visualize a space she doesn't have — they meet her in the car, or after the kids fall asleep, or between fajr and the school run. The wisdom comes from voices she recognizes. The streak doesn't guilt her. The app is patient in the way the women who raised her were patient.

None of this is universal. That's the point.

Sometimes you need to do the work. And sometimes the tool needs to actually fit your life. Both things can be true.

Specific beats universal every single time

There's a phrase in marketing that's become a cliché because it's true: if you're talking to everyone, you're talking to no one.

The wellness products that actually change people's lives aren't the ones with the biggest user base. They're the ones that picked a specific person, named her out loud, and built toward her. Liberate did this for POC meditation. Therapy for Black Girls did this for mental health access. Exhale did it for Black women's emotional wellness. Moody Month did it for cycle-aware daily care.

We Unearthed is doing this for women of color who want a reflection space that holds a journal, a mood, a season of life, and a cycle — in the same room. A 5-minute daily ritual that fits into the life you actually have. Prompts that know her faith exists, and prompts that don't assume it does. A room she doesn't have to explain herself to get into.

That's not for everyone. Which is exactly why it'll work.

One last thing

I want to be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying mainstream wellness apps are bad. I'm not saying people who love Calm are wrong (both of those things are true and I don't care). I'm not building this in opposition to anything else. If you love Calm or Headspace, keep using them. If something works for you, it works. That's enough.

What I am saying is: if you've closed a wellness app because it wasn't made with you in mind, that probably wasn't you being bad at wellness. That was a product that wasn't built for your life. Both things can be true at once — you might need to do the work, AND the tool might need to actually fit you.

There's room for a different kind of space. One with a door that locks. One that was built with you already inside it.

Every month you keep using tools that weren't made for your life is another month of that small "I must be bad at wellness" residue. You're not. You just haven't tried anything actually built for you yet. That's worth fixing while you still have the energy to try.