Pulse
UX research • wireframes • branding • UI design
An app for building consistent mindful pauses and staying connected with your wellness community.
Completed
Spring 2024
Personality
supportive
connected
playful
Brand Tool Kit
Playfair Display
Lato
Objective
Seasoned wellness practitioners often lose touch with their personal practice and community between in-person sessions. To stay connected, many rely on social media or messaging apps that are cluttered, distracting, and not designed to support intentional reflection. This creates inconsistent habits, weaker community bonds, and digital behaviors that feel misaligned with their wellness values.
Solution
Pause is a mobile app centered around the core idea of the mindfulness community: coming back to the present moment. It’s designed to help users build a consistent pause practice while staying gently connected with their community. Through customizable reminders, users can begin guided or self‑led pause sessions, reflect on their experience, and track their progress through a living tea cup metaphor. A simple community space allows friends to share reflections, send supportive nudges, and stay present in each other’s practice without the noise, pressure, or distraction of traditional social platforms.
User interviews & empathy map
A few clear patterns emerged:
Users rely on social media and messaging apps to maintain wellness connections, but these platforms create noise, fatigue, and shallow interaction rather than meaningful support.
Despite strong personal wellness intentions, users struggle to maintain consistent pause practices without gentle accountability and structure integrated into their daily lives.
Users have a deep desire to sustain intentional connection and reflection after in-person wellness experiences, but lack a dedicated, low-pressure space designed to support ongoing presence and community.
Wireframes
Designing for presence.
Supporting mindful practice and community connection without adding noise, pressure, or distraction.
Pause flow designed to reduce cognitive load
Users can begin a guided or self-led pause in one tap, with the option to exit the app and complete their practice offline. This respects existing routines while positioning the app as a gentle anchor, not a destination.
Low-friction reflection capture
Optional post-pause reflection is designed to take seconds, not minutes. Voice input, writing, drawing, or photo log allows users to capture meaningful insights without interrupting their sense of calm.
Emotional feedback through the tea cup metaphor
An animated tea cup visually reflects the user’s practice consistency over time - a more compassionate, emotionally resonant form of feedback.
Lightweight community accountability
The reflection circle enables users to share presence and gentle acknowledgement, instead of algorithmic engagement. This fosters connection and accountability while preserving the app’s friendly, restorative tone.
Practice visibility without surveillance
Users can see when friends complete pauses or may need support, enabling gentle nudges that reinforce shared intention without creating obligation or intrusion.
Gentle Design & Mascot
A simple profile keeps the focus on presence rather than pure performance, allowing users to share just the essentials while still feeling connected to their community and grounded in their practice. The streamlined home screen centers the daily mindful pause, making it easy to return to the practice and see gentle cues from friends practicing alongside you.
The navigation bar’s soft curve and the warm, earthy colors of the interface create a calming visual rhythm that mirrors the app’s intention of helping users slow down and return to the present moment. The friendly, emotionally variable tea cup mascot adds warmth and relatability, offering gentle cues that encourage users to check in with their mindful pause throughout the day.
Onboarding
The onboarding experience is designed to acclimate users to the app’s main function: to nourish a consistent present moment practice, and bringing awareness to the community-centered features.
Mindful Pause Flow
When it’s time to complete your mindful pause, Pulse walks you through a simple breath session, or there’s an option to complete it on your own. You can reflect and share your experience with your community afterwards, or you can keep it private instead.
Holding Friends Gently Accountable
When you or your friends have delayed a scheduled mindful pause, Pulse makes notice in the community tab so that your friends can hold you accountable to stick to your present moment practice. This reinforces the strength of practice alongside your close community in a gentle way.
Maddy sends a mindful nudge to Luca
Luca’s notification screen
Light & Customizable Community Engagement
Community engagement is centered around reflections after mindful pauses and awareness of events, filtered in any way you like. This nurtures intentional connection surrounding a shared mindfulness practice.
