Gutsy
A speculative health tool that makes the gut brain conversation visible. You swallow a capsule the size of a vitamin, and the app translates what your gut is doing into something you can actually read.
Overview
The brief asked us to design a tool for an invisible sense. We pointed ours inward.
The Figma Buildathon prompt asked teams to design a speculative tool that tracks something intangible about human sensory experience. Our team took it as permission to look inward, at a sense most people don't know they have.
The gut contains 500 million neurons. It produces 90 percent of the body's serotonin and 50 percent of its dopamine. It communicates with the brain constantly through the vagus nerve, shaping mood, immunity, hormones, metabolism, and decision-making, in real time, beneath conscious awareness. Gutsy is our attempt to let someone listen in.
Starting Point
We have always had language for the gut, long before science could explain why.
Gut feeling. Gutsy. Butterflies in the stomach. Gut wrenching. Across cultures and centuries, people have spoken about the gut as a seat of intuition and emotion long before modern medicine offered a mechanism.
That tension became our anchor. Ancient wisdom pointing at something science is only beginning to map. We wanted to build a tool that sat at that intersection, one that took the gut seriously as a sensory organ and asked: what if you could actually read it?
The Five Dimensions
We built a framework around the gut brain axis first, then let the dashboard fall out of it.
Before any screen, we mapped the neural, immune, endocrine, and metabolic pathways through which the gut and brain communicate. That research became the five dashboard categories at the core of the app. Every other design decision flowed from this structure.
Research Before Pixels
Four days is not a lot of time. So we spent most of the first two on paper.
We were deliberate about sequence. Before opening Figma proper, we mapped a full design system and the complete user flows on canvas. Logic first, hierarchy second, pixels last. The discipline paid off later: when we changed our minds about a component, we changed it once, in the system, not across dozens of frames.
Research the gut brain axis
Read the science. Map the neural, immune, endocrine, and metabolic pathways. Decide what a consumer app could plausibly surface and what it shouldn't even try.
Define the five categories
Group biomarkers into legible buckets. Each category needed to be distinct enough that a user could glance and know where to look, but connected enough that the dashboard felt like one organism.
Draw flows on canvas
Sketch the whole journey before touching high fidelity. Onboarding, personalization, prep for a scan, the dashboard, the detail pages, the live view. Every path traced out on one big canvas.
Build the system, then the screens
Typography, color, the orb vocabulary, the pill motif. Components before compositions. Key pages first, then the long tail.
Bring Figma Make in only where motion earned it
Static design for most of the app. Figma Make for the live view and the detailed analysis pages, where interactivity changed what the design meant.
Designing the Invisible
You can't photograph a serotonin signal. Every design choice became a way to give shape to something without one.
The visual language was probably the hardest and most rewarding part. Gut data doesn't look like anything. We had to invent a vocabulary that felt organic, internal, and alive without tipping into clinical or frightening.
Five gradient orbs, one per dimension
Each category carries a shifting, multi-color gradient. The bright variability reflects two things at once: the diversity of every person's unique biome, and the kind of signal that category carries. No two guts are alike. The visual system makes that feel true.
A dark base, like looking into a body
Gutsy runs on near-black. The dark base lets the gradient orbs glow, and it signals that this isn't a productivity app. You're looking into something internal and private.
The pill as the logo
A soft round shape that references the ingestible capsule, recurring across the brand. Approachable, not medical. Something you'd actually want to swallow.
Geist Mono everywhere
Monospace type reads as technical without feeling like a medical chart. It gives data the weight of being read by a machine, which is exactly what's happening, while keeping enough character that the app feels warm.
The wavy gut motif
A soft, fluid wave threads through landing screens and transitions. It references the organ literally but abstractly, and gives the product a visual signature that carries across surfaces.
Pink accent, one color, used sparingly
The pink (#EF7ED8) is the only saturated non-gradient color in the system. Reserved for primary actions and recommendations. Scarcity makes it read as important instead of decorative.
Design System
One reference surface. Every screen that followed came from here.
Before moving into high fidelity, we built a single design-system page that the rest of the work referenced. Geist Mono for type. A constrained grayscale alongside semantic color pairs for success, warning, and error. Five gradient orbs for the product's five dimensions. A small shape library. The pill-shaped Gutsy logo in two weights.
The Flow
From first open to first reading, in as few steps as possible.
The onboarding is three beats: understand what Gutsy reads, personalize your profile, prepare for the scan. Once the capsule is swallowed, the dashboard opens on the five dimensions, each with a one-glance summary. Any card taps through to a detailed analysis page with key metrics, insights, and recommendations.
Screens
Nine surfaces, in the order someone actually moves through them.
Figma Make Workflow
We used Figma Make only where motion and interactivity earned it.
Static design carried the vast majority of the app. Figma Make came in for two specific surfaces: the live view of the capsule moving through the GI tract, and the detailed analysis pages, where progress bars, trend graphs, and recommendations reward a prototype over a static frame.
What made this work was being able to copy Figma Make outputs directly back into the design file. We could prototype rapidly, see something real, and iterate without losing fidelity or momentum. It collapsed the gap between design and prototype in a way that genuinely changed how fast a four-person team could move in four days.
The Ghrelin Question
Deciding what to leave out was harder than deciding what to show.
With so much happening in the gut, the real challenge beyond visualizing metrics was knowing which ones to surface at all. Not every signal is actionable, and not every actionable signal is appropriate for every person.
Case Study / One decision out of many
The hunger metric we chose not to build
Hunger is influenced by ghrelin, a hormone produced largely in the stomach. Ghrelin is also a notoriously noisy signal. It spikes on a schedule, responds to stress, and doesn't always reflect actual caloric need. Surfacing a "hunger signal" risks being misleading at best.
More seriously, we had to consider the impact of that metric on people for whom it could trigger disordered eating patterns. We chose not to include it as a primary metric. That kind of decision, repeated across every dashboard category, shaped the whole product.
Gutsy is speculative, but we didn't want it to be irresponsible. Framing the Risk dimension as "patterns worth watching" rather than "diagnoses" came out of the same conversation.
Maya and Dan
The personas are not demographics. They are the emotional core of the product.
Maya and Dan came from real experiences members of our team have had. The frustration of not knowing why your body feels off. The exhaustion of doing everything right and still not seeing results. Writing their stories made us realize how much power there is in showing the gut brain connection through lived experience rather than data.
Maya's afternoon anxiety used to feel random. Gutsy connects it to her luteal phase and her morning coffee, which her gut metabolizes differently that week. She swaps coffee for matcha for five days a month and feels like herself again. One change, grounded in her own data.
Dan eats right after every workout because that's what the internet said. His absorption window tells a different story. His gut goes quiet for ninety minutes after intense exercise and barely absorbs what he eats. He shifts his meal later, and finally starts seeing the results he's been working for.
Closer Than It Looks
The most surprising thing we learned is how close this future already is.
Atmo Biosciences, a real company, received FDA 510(k) clearance in June 2025 for an ingestible gas-sensing capsule the size of a vitamin. It travels the GI tract, measures hydrogen, methane, CO₂, and oxygen in real time, and transmits the data wirelessly. Early human trials have uncovered mechanisms never seen before, including a potentially new immune pathway in the stomach.
The technology isn't speculative. We extended it speculatively by imagining near-future capabilities like pH monitoring, motility pattern reading, hormonal activity proxies, and microbial metabolite signatures. But the foundation is already here.
The capsule exists. What we designed is the layer above it: the interface, the five-category framing, the ethical scoping, the emotional register. All the parts that turn a medical device into something someone might actually want to use.
Reflection
The goal was never to make people depend on the app. It was to help them put the phone down.
We always imagined Gutsy as a tool that works best with longitudinal data. A single scan is a snapshot, useful but limited. Used over weeks and months, it becomes something more: a way to genuinely understand your own body on your own terms.
The vision was that people would use it often at first, build up a picture of how their gut behaves, and then gradually taper off, checking back in when something felt off or when they wanted to reassess. Gutsy is the kind of product that should eventually make itself unnecessary. That felt like the honest thing to design toward.
Four days was short, and we didn't win anything. But we came out of it with a clearer belief about what speculative design is for. Not a concept video. A rehearsal for the ethics of tools that are genuinely coming.