Natural Fertility Tracking is Easy with PeakDay
By Melissa Gorely
CCL ‘s trusted CycleProGo app has received a timely upgrade. From a graphic-based, more colorful design to new helpful features, the PeakDay app makes CCL’s scientifically based sympto-thermal method easier to use than ever. PeakDay’s customizable features meet the needs of all users – new students, teachers, and medical professionals – who want an accurate, convenient, and pleasant way to chart and interpret signs or even work with multiple fertility charts.
Attractive Design
“The new design uses attractive colors and is very graphic, with buttons of images for charting the different daily symptoms,” CCL long-time TC, Coach, and National Volunteer Coordinator Stacey Nagle shared excitedly.
Colleen O’Rourke, another long-time CCL TC and Volunteer Coordinator, also appreciates the more graphic based design. Nagle and O’Rourke have both been very involved in the year- long app redesign and more recent testing of PeakDay. “There are big, bold graphics for mucus,” Colleen O’Rourke described. “Once you’re not bleeding, the symptoms offered always start with temperature, so you don’t have to scroll past menstruation all the other days of your cycle.”
In fact, there’s no scrolling at all with PeakDay’s one-screen design emphasis. Now an entire fertility cycle’s completed chart can fit in one screen. Observations of one type are made on one screen, then users swipe to the next type of observation or next function they want to utilize.
Helpful Features
App users can customize their personal fertility charts to include recording symptoms in addition to mucus and temperature, from cervix checks to hormone testing strips and more. The algorithms for calculating phases based on the time-tested rules of CCL’s 99% effective sympto-thermal method will remain the same, of course.
“My favorite feature is the new ‘Compare’ option on the Chart Summary screen,” Colleen O’Rourke shared. This feature creates color-based bar graphs derived from stats from the previous six cycles for users to view at a glance. Stats have always been available, but the graphs will be especially useful to all those looking for patterns in cycles and was created with medical professionals in mind. Users will be able share their account access with medical professionals or just share individual fertility charts with an increased variety of “share” options available in PeakDay.
“It’s the variety of share options that will make the app a valuable instructional tool for teachers and coaches,” Stacey Nagle commented, “especially as we encourage more and more students to use it.” Students can choose to reach out to teaching couples(TCs) or coaches by sharing their account access or by sharing their chart with a couple taps on their preferred method of sharing – text, email, to the message board, or within the app. CCL FSI coaches will monitor the message board and have developed extensive FAQs as a start for those who go to the Get Help feature.
Easy to Use
The fact that PeakDay is so “user-friendly” is Silvia Schmidt’s favorite attribute of the upgrade. “It’s almost self-explanatory,” she said. Silvia Schmidt is CCL’s Senior Manager of International Development and long-time Spanish programs creator and teacher.
The app was designed for ease of use in Spanish and English. “If all of your phone settings are Spanish, then the app will load in Spanish from the beginning,” Silvia explained. “You can also go between English and Spanish with a one button setting,” she noted.
The transition to PeakDay for all current CycleProGo users, Spanish and English, will be a smooth one when it happens. All chart history will be transferred to PeakDay with immediate access at account creation with the user’s CycleProGo username and password. Current subscription plans (free or paid) will also transfer. There will be a free introductory period for all users of the app with the usual extension of that period for enrolled CCL students.
Go to www.peakday.com to find out more about features, subscriptions and how to transition. You can download PeakDay on both the Google and Apple app stores.