Kindest.
UX research on Kindest, an app for keeping up with friends and family, testing how it could stand out from the calendars and reminders people use.
Scope
Client
Duration
Role
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Where the research began
(01)
Kindest needed to show its value quickly, next to the calendars and reminders people already used.
Kindest helps people stay in touch with the friends and family they care about: users plan small, regular activities, like a weekly call, then get reminders and save shared memories along the way. Since 2024, I’ve been its sole researcher, working directly with the founder.
My research began with a survey of nine people, four interviews, and a review of similar apps. Seven of the nine survey respondents named low motivation or emotional distance as a top challenge in staying in touch, more often than forgetting dates. Even so, birthday reminders drew the strongest interest. Because they take little setup and can be useful right away, I recommended making them the starting point for new users, along with flexible reminder settings and a clear explanation of why Kindest asks for contacts.
Later, in fall 2025, the founder asked me to review Kindest’s App Store page and first-time experience. In a quick comparison with a few similar apps, I found that most read like contact-management tools or couple-only apps, and few made privacy a central promise. Kindest, by contrast, covered family, friends, partners, and self-care in one app, with privacy built in. I suggested making this clearer in the first screenshots people see, with captions that lead with benefits and one screenshot devoted to privacy.
To have something to measure future changes against, I asked the founder what numbers he had. He shared a 1.5% App Store conversion rate for September 2025, which I used as a reference point.
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What the research revealed
(02)
Later versions addressed earlier problems and created new expectations.
From December 2025 to August 2026, I followed the same returning participant through three test versions of Kindest, tracking what became easier and what still caused difficulty. After I shared the first-round report, the founder said he would try to implement some of my suggestions.
Calendar
In the first round, the participant could set up repeating activities, but Kindest had no calendar view showing when they would happen. As she put it, “These actions are great, but [the app] doesn’t tell you when they are.” I recommended adding a simple calendar or weekly view, something an interviewee in my earlier research had also asked for.
By the third round, the test version included a calendar view like the one I had recommended, showing activities by date. She called it the most useful part of the app because she could now see when things were happening. Seeing her schedule there also made her want to mark activities done from the same screen, but she had to leave the calendar to do it.
Birthdays and important dates
In the second round, the founder asked me to test whether the participant could set up a birthday reminder for one of the people she’d added to Kindest, the feature I had recommended as a starting point for new users. She searched the main tabs, the page of activity ideas, and each person’s profile but couldn’t set one up. The founder later confirmed that birthday reminders were planned for the next release. Her search showed where she expected the option to be, so I recommended a single, clearly labeled place to add birthdays.
By the third round, a new section for birthdays and other important dates appeared in one of the places she had searched before: a person’s profile. She found it on her own and set a yearly birthday reminder, though she wasn’t sure exactly when the notification would arrive. The date also appeared in the calendar, and she later used the section to add an anniversary.
AI features and privacy
The founder also wanted to explore AI, so the August version included three experimental features: gift suggestions, conversation starters, and greeting-card drafts. Gift suggestions felt personal to the participant when they drew on memories she had saved about someone. For someone she had saved few memories about, however, the ideas were much more generic.
At the same time, seeing her saved memories in the suggestions prompted her to ask what information the AI was using and where it went. When she opened Kindest’s privacy information to find out, she said, “I care about this but don’t really understand what all this means.” Her reaction pointed to a product tension: the same saved details that made the suggestions more personal also made clear explanations of data use more important.
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What the research recommended
(03)
Kindest's clearest advantage may be helping people think of what to do, not just reminding them.
After the August round, I made recommendations for each area, then stepped back to look at the bigger picture.
Calendar and important dates
I recommended that the founder take the calendar view and the new section for important dates into the public app, along with two refinements: letting people open or complete activities right from the calendar, and making the next reminder date clear.
AI features and privacy
Among the AI features, I ranked gift suggestions first because saved memories could make them specific to the person. Conversation starters needed more testing to sound natural, and in the August round it was less clear what the greeting-card feature added beyond a general AI tool. To address that tension, I also recommended a short, plain explanation of what information the AI uses and how.
What sets Kindest apart
More broadly, an ordinary calendar app is useful once someone already knows what they want to do. Kindest may help earlier by flagging an upcoming birthday and suggesting a gift tied to a shared memory, so I proposed testing whether a more relationship-focused experience would help people see the difference.
What remains open
Smaller usability issues still need work, such as a crowded page of suggested activities. Because the later rounds involved one returning participant, these findings suggest what to investigate further rather than show measured improvement. I also recommended recording the App Store numbers before a future release and comparing them afterward.
“Alex handled user research for my mobile app, Kindest, and did an outstanding job from start to finish. He took care of the whole project, finding people to interview, creating the survey, running the interviews, and digging into the responses. The insights and suggestions he delivered were clear, practical, and immediately useful for improving the app. I hope I will have a chance to work with Alex again and learn from him."
Lukáš Soukup, Founder, Kindest (LukyLab)
