"We are not privy to the stories behind people's actions, so we should be patient with others and suspend judgement of them, recognizing the limits of our understanding." - Epictetus

Case Study

Harmony

Abstract

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Impact

This project showed us the same problem: most wellness apps assume that the user has bandwidth to spare, and if you're dealing with trauma or cognitive overload, that assumption is exactly backwards. Harmony is our solution. It is a sound-based wellness app that doesn't ask more of you than you have. It includes mood check-ins, adaptive audio, and a visible emergency reset, all designed to minimize the number of decisions someone has to make when they're already stretched thin. We tested it against Headspace and people set it up almost three times faster, with noticeably less mental effort along the way. But testing also showed us where we'd gotten it wrong. The mood check-in confused people, and the emergency reset was hard to find. These important fixes were imperative from the first prototype. If there's one thing we took from this, it's that calm design isn't really about aesthetics. It's about anticipating the moment when someone's at their worst and making sure the app doesn't make it harder.

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Impact