Sohum

I ran twelve interviews and three diary studies over two weeks. The pattern was blunt: beginners did not want to meditate, they wanted to stop feeling wound up before a meeting. They also hated being watched. Streaks, badges and weekly reports read as judgement, and the moment someone missed a day they deleted the app rather than face the broken chain.

We cut the streak. In its place the home screen asks one question, how much time have you got, with ninety seconds as the default and the largest tap target on the screen. Longer sessions exist but you have to go looking for them. It felt risky, retention mechanics are the industry default, but it tested as the single most-liked change in round two.

A visual breathing guide is useless the moment someone shuts their eyes, which is exactly what you want them to do. I paired a slow expanding form with a haptic pulse at the turn of each inhale and exhale, so the phone can sit face down in a lap and still keep time. Rive let me prototype the easing properly, and the therapist tuned the ratio until it matched how she paces a room.

Eight moderated tests on the clickable prototype. The first build hid the session length behind a settings sheet and four of eight participants never found it. The second put it on the home screen as a row of three tiles and everyone completed the task in under six seconds. The audio permission prompt also had to move: asking on launch got refused, asking after the first completed session got accepted every time.