Picture this. You're at a restaurant with friends. The food arrives. Before you eat, you need to inject. So you excuse yourself, find the bathroom, lock the door, and do what you need to do standing next to a hand dryer.

Nobody asked you to do that. Nobody told you to hide. But you did, because injecting in public feels exposing in a way that's hard to articulate. People stare. They make assumptions. Sometimes they say something. More often they just look, and that's enough.

This was one of the earliest and most important things I learned when I started researching Drop. The clinical problem, rotation and tracking, was what I set out to solve. But underneath it was something harder to design for: the way self-injection sits in public life, and the quiet effort people make to keep it invisible.

Stigma shapes behaviour in ways that aren't always obvious from the outside. It affects where people inject, when they inject, and whether they inject at all. Some people skip doses rather than deal with the social calculus of injecting somewhere they might be seen. That's not a compliance failure. That's a completely human response to a situation that society hasn't caught up with yet.

So what does it mean to design an app for something people do in private?

It means the app has to feel private too. Discreet notifications. No language that feels clinical or shameful. An interface that opens quickly, logs quickly, and closes quickly, because sometimes that's all the time you have. It means not making people feel like patients every time they open it. It means treating the act of logging an injection as ordinary, because for the people who use Drop, it is ordinary. It's just their life.

Drop started as a university project exploring stigma around self-injection in public spaces. That origin has never really left it. Every design decision, from the tone of the copy to the way the app handles reminders, is made with the awareness that the person on the other side is managing something real, often quietly, often alone.