Designing confidence into equine recovery, one ride at a time

The intent of this app wasn't to push riders to progress faster. It was the opposite.

I wanted to reduce the mental burden of remembering a plan and make it easier to execute exactly as prescribed. When progress is slow and incremental, confidence matters. Knowing you're doing the right thing — even when it feels boring or frustrating — makes it easier to stick with the plan and avoid re-injury. This app is about trust in small steps adding up over time.

I chose to build this as an iOS app for two reasons.

First, I wanted to push myself to learn how to build a functioning app through vibe coding, rather than stopping at a prototype. Second, this experience needed to work in motion. When you're riding, you can't stop to check a screen every few minutes. That meant the experience had to rely on sound, haptics, or simple cues to guide gait changes — similar to human interval training apps, but adapted for equine rehab. There weren't existing tools in the market that did this well, and none built specifically for horses.

To keep the project grounded, I set clear constraints up front.

This is an iOS-only MVP with no backend, no authentication, and a deliberately narrow scope. The focus is a simple rehab plan builder and a guided way to execute that plan consistently. I intentionally avoided building full ride tracking or performance analytics. Those problems are already well-served by other apps, and competing there wasn't the goal. This project is about execution, not measurement.

I chose to vibe code this project using Cursor and Xcode, with Figma as a supporting tool rather than the primary output.

Most of my professional work involves iterating on existing systems. Starting from zero can be intimidating. Using AI to help generate a rough first version made it easier to get unstuck. Even when the first attempt failed completely — which it did — having something tangible made it easier to regroup and try again. Once a basic version existed, I could fall back into familiar territory: refining interactions, improving hierarchy, and polishing the experience.

The current version supports building a rehab plan and guiding its execution, with push notifications used as a workaround for gait changes. Those notifications can surface on Apple Watch if enabled, which helps, but isn't as integrated as I'd like.

The biggest unresolved piece is a proper Apple Watch companion app. That was the original vision — using haptics and simple visuals to guide riders without requiring a phone. My first attempt at this failed due to complexity, so for now I've focused on stabilizing the core iOS experience. This is still very much a work in progress.

At this stage, success is simple: something I can use consistently during rehab rides, without second-guessing the plan or doing mental math.

Longer-term, I'd love to share this with my barn community and potentially release it more broadly. There's space in the market for something like this, and if it proves useful beyond my own use, I'd be excited to keep iterating and see where it goes.

Vibe coding has made it possible to turn ideas into real, usable things in a way that wasn't accessible before. In the past, the best outcome might have been a Figma prototype. Now, I can build something functional and learn from using it in the real world.

As a design leader, this has shifted how I think about exploration and iteration. The barrier between idea and artifact is lower than it's ever been, and that opens up new ways of learning, experimenting, and guiding teams toward better outcomes. This project is still evolving, but it's already expanded how I think about what's possible.