SoulSync – Designing Calm in Chaos
A 48-hour hackathon project where I designed a mindfulness app to help professionals build sustainable meditation habits through simplicity, mood-based flows, and ambient UI.
Project Overview:
SoulSync is a mobile meditation app designed to support users in forming consistent mindfulness habits. Created within a 48-hour design hackathon, the project focused on delivering value quickly without sacrificing emotional depth.
Background:
Target users are busy professionals (ages 25–40) who face high digital and mental noise. Many struggle with mental wellness due to irregular routines, lack of focus, and screen fatigue. Meditation apps often overwhelm new users or require too much commitment upfront.
Brief/Challenge:
In a 48-hour design sprint, our team set out to build a wellness product that genuinely helps users integrate mindfulness into their fast-paced routines. The goal was to deliver a lightweight, practical, and delightful meditation tool without overwhelming users.
Objective:
Understand users’ mental health struggles and meditation habits
Create an engaging mobile experience tailored for daily use
Build and prototype a product that could be scaled further post-hackathon
Research & Understanding the Problem: We conducted quick user interviews with 5 working professionals aged 25–40, who often felt overwhelmed and found it hard to stick with mindfulness practices.
Key insights:
They lacked time and motivation to meditate regularly.
They preferred shorter, bite-sized guided sessions.
Habit-building was easier when tracking progress and getting reminders.
Insights: Conducted rapid interviews with 6 participants who tried meditation in the past
Top insight: “I don’t have the time to figure out what to do. I just want to press play.”
Mood-based meditation surfaced as a preferred trigger mechanism
Ideation & Exploration: Designed a minimalist onboarding flow to assess the user's current mood and recommend a personalized session
Explored 3 core features:
Daily Calm (auto-recommended meditation)
Mood Journal (log feelings before and after a session)
Streak Tracker (motivate consistency)
Visual Design & Style Guide: We chose warm tones like orange and soft beige to create a cozy, inviting interface. Rounded elements and illustrations conveyed ease and lightness.
Typography: Rounded, soft sans-serif
Icons: Calm and minimal
Imagery: Nature, meditation poses, soothing gradients
Conclusion
This project taught me that true calm in UX comes from reducing decisions, not just pretty visuals. Prioritizing user feelings over features led to a product that feels personal, even in its prototype state.