Why I’m building Oriyali

I’m a product designer. I build things for a living, usually for other people. This one I’m building on my own, and I want to be plain about why, because you should know who made the thing you’re thinking of trusting with the worst two weeks of your month.

A young woman sitting on a wooden chair with her knees drawn up, holding a mug in both hands, watching rain run down a window.

What I found

I went looking at PMDD the way I’d look at any problem: read everything, then read what people actually say rather than what the marketing says.

What I found was a disorder that takes one to two weeks a month away from somewhere between three and eight percent of people who menstruate — and a set of tools that mostly fail them. The app the community relies on most is free, well-intentioned, and unreliable in the specific ways that hurt most: people logged out en masse, entries lost, days you can’t backfill, support requests unanswered for weeks. The big period apps bury PMDD under wellness content, and one of them settled with the FTC over how it handled data. Another women’s app leaked phone numbers to an analytics vendor.

So the pattern is: the people with the most to lose are asked to hand over the most sensitive record they will ever keep, to software that loses it.

And underneath all of it, the same sentence, over and over: nobody believed me. IAPMD’s global survey puts the average wait for an accurate PMDD diagnosis at around twelve years. Twelve years of being told it’s just PMS, of turning up in a good week with nothing to show, of starting to wonder whether you are in fact the problem.

What I think the actual problem is

It isn’t that PMDD is unknown. It’s that it is invisible at the exact moment someone is qualified to see it.

You go to the doctor when you can get an appointment, which is usually the week you feel fine. You describe a fortnight you can barely remember. There is nothing in the room to look at except you, saying it. A diagnosis needs two cycles of daily records — but keeping daily records for two months requires you to log on the days when getting out of bed is the achievement.

That’s a design problem, not a medical one. The clinical instrument exists. What doesn’t exist is a version of it that a person in the middle of a bad luteal phase will actually keep using.

What I’m trying to make

Warmth is not the opposite of credibility here. It is what makes the credibility reachable. Nobody logs their symptoms into a cold medical form for two cycles straight. But you might open something that feels like relief — something that already knows what’s coming and isn’t frightened of you.

So: a soft surface over a clinical spine. Something drawn by a hand, that is quiet on the hard days and brighter on the good ones. Underneath it, a real DRSP a doctor accepts. Beauty buys the daily habit. The habit produces the data. The data is the proof.

Which is also why this website is not an advertisement. If you never install anything, I want you to leave here having learned something true about your own month. That’s not generosity — I think it’s the only honest order to do it in.

What I’m promising

Your data stays yours. Local-first, optional encrypted sync into your own iCloud, no third-party analytics near a symptom, and a delete button that deletes. I will not sell it, share it or broker it, and no acquisition offer changes that.
No dark patterns. For someone mood-volatile, a manipulative paywall isn’t a growth tactic, it’s a betrayal. No fake urgency, no guilt on the way out, nothing you can’t cancel.
No red alerts. As the hard days approach, the app gets quieter and warmer, not louder. An alarming interface, for this user, is harm.
No diagnosis claims. This is a tracker and an advocacy tool. It helps you get a diagnosis; it doesn’t make one.
I’ll say when I’m wrong. One person built this. There will be things I got wrong, and I would rather hear them from you than not.

What I’m not

I’m not a clinician. I haven’t lived this. What I can do is build carefully, read the research properly, cite it honestly, and listen to the people who have — which is what I’ve tried to do on every page here.

If something on this site reads wrong to you, or lands badly, or gets it plainly incorrect, tell me: hello@oriyali.com. I read everything.