Growth RadarPrivate quarterly mirror for designersNot a journal. Not a dashboard. Not a streak.
A private quarterly ritual for designers who want to see their craft change shape. Write one line a day. Mark three goals each Friday. Every quarter, step into a guided reading that turns scattered effort into a visible shape.
Single-user by design. No social comparison, no manager dashboard, no productivity theatre. Just a private record you can return to.
PositioningBuilt for reflection
A daily note, a weekly pulse, a quarterly ritual. The point is not to track more — it is to keep a credible record of how the work is changing.
LineageThe thinking underneath
The cadence is not a guess. Daily capture borrows from Schön's reflection-on-action. The quarterly redraw is Kolb's reflective observation cycle. The 10-second entry is Fogg's behavior model scaled until motivation barely matters. The radar itself is a T — breadth across eleven families, depth within any one.
Because motivation is not reliable, and you already know it.
Most reflection apps fail on the Tuesday you're tired. The app's first job is to make the daily input so small that the bad days still count.
BJ Fogg spent twenty years at Stanford watching people start and break habits. His finding, in one line: behavior happens when Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt meet. Raise Ability high enough and you stop needing the other two.
Shapes: Ten seconds, 240 characters, one tap, zero notifications.
A hundred years of memory research say the same thing: something reviewed at expanding intervals sticks roughly twice as well as something reviewed all at once. Applied to your career: daily is where material lives; quarterly is where meaning forms.
Shapes: Four nested loops — day, week, quarter, year.
Writing things down is not the same as thinking about them.
A log is a pile of moments. A practice is a pile of moments you've gone back to. This is the middle of the product — the part that turns the first into the second.
Donald Schön studied how architects, therapists, and designers actually get better. His answer: the real learning doesn't happen in the doing. It happens later, quietly, when you re-read the work and notice what it was trying to tell you.
Shapes: The quarterly ritual. Dark screen, fifteen minutes.
David Kolb's 1984 model says learning is a four-beat loop: do the work → reflect on it → form a theory → try the theory. Most tools give you step one. Growth Radar is built around all four.
Shapes: Daily = experience. Weekly = reflection. Quarterly = theory. Three new goals = experiment.
Chris Argyris noticed that smart people get stuck because they keep optimizing actions toward goals they never re-examine. Single-loop asks 'did I hit it?' Double-loop asks 'was it even the right thing to work on?'
Shapes: The goal retrospective asks both.
Growth is invisible unless you give it a shape.
The strange thing about a design career is how hard it is to see. You close a year of work and can barely answer 'what did I actually get better at?' The last third of the app exists to make that visible without making it public.
A T-shaped designer is broad across adjacent fields and deep in one or two. The idea left IDEO and ended up on almost every hiring ladder — but almost no designer can draw their own T.
Shapes: Eleven families around the edge. Fifty-seven skills underneath.
Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus watched chess players, pilots, and nurses and found that skill progresses through five stages — from following rules, to using judgment, to acting on intuition. Most five-star scales throw all of that away.
Shapes: Aware → Beginner → Intermediate → Advanced → Expert → Master.
Three decades of motivation research converge on one finding: people stay intrinsically motivated when they have autonomy, competence, and relatedness — and public scoring replaces the first two with anxiety.
Shapes: No feed, no followers, no manager dashboard. Silence is a feature.
Eight frameworks. Three moves. One private record of how you change.
References· Kolb 1984 · Schön 1983 · Fogg 2020 · Ryan & Deci 2000 · Dreyfus 1980 · Argyris 1977 · Ebbinghaus 1885 · Guest 1991
Ritual ModeThe quarterly reading
Reflection-on-action is a half-century-old idea from Donald Schön. Growth Radar gives it a shape, a time, and an artifact. The log becomes evidence, the app guides you through rating the work, and the redraw turns the last ninety days into something you can actually see.
Here is your last ninety days.
User Testing
How are you doing here?
Your Q2 2026 shape.
Screen IThe habit
Write one line, tag the skill it sharpened, and move on. Over a quarter, those small entries become the material for a more honest reading of the work. Ten-second input by design — Fogg's behavior model scaled until motivation barely matters.
Low friction by design. Useful later, not loud now.
Screen IIThe radar
Your career has a shape — this is the first time most designers have seen theirs. The faint polygon behind today's radar is last quarter's. The ghost is the point.
A record of movement, not a leaderboard.
QuestionsBefore you begin
Growth Radar is a private iOS app that helps designers track how their craft changes over time. You write one line a day, tag the skill it sharpened, mark three goals each Friday, and every quarter the app guides you through a reading that turns scattered effort into a visible shape.
Working product, UX, UI, and visual designers who want a private, honest record of their skill growth — without social feeds, manager dashboards, or productivity theatre.
Every quarter, the app enters Ritual Mode — a guided fifteen-minute reading. You review your entries, rate each of your 57 skills on a six-level scale (Aware through Master), revisit your goals, and write a short reflection. The radar redraws to show your new shape.
Yes. Growth Radar is single-user by design. There are no social features, no manager dashboard, no analytics SDKs, and no ads. Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest. You can export or delete everything at any time.
Growth Radar is free to download on the App Store.
The radar maps 57 design skills across 11 families — including Fundamental, Research, Visual, Interaction, Information Architecture, Content, Systems, Strategy, Leadership, Craft, and Deep Skills. You can customise the skill map in Settings.
Yes. You can export a complete copy of all your entries, goals, reflections, ratings, and radar snapshots as a JSON file at any time from within the app.
What RemainsAfter a year
Over time, the daily notes, weekly pulses, and quarterly readings accumulate into a body of evidence that is useful in self-review and meaningful in private.
Download on theApp Store