✦ RELUMA
Designing a wellbeing app for people who don't have time for wellbeing apps.
Reluma is a wellbeing app designed for working professionals who experience stress in real time but rarely have the time or energy to address it. Instead of long meditation sessions or habit tracking, the project explored how structured three-minute micro-interventions — tied to specific moments in the workday — could help users regulate stress without disrupting their flow. The goal was not to eliminate pressure, but to design a pocket of calm that fits inside a busy day.
role
UX Researcher & UI Designer
duration
2 weeks
industry
Wellbeing / Self-Care
tools
Figma, Figjam, Claude AI & Google Forms
The problem
When I transitioned from architecture into UX, I kept thinking about something that carried over from both disciplines. In architecture, we design physical spaces that regulate how people feel. Light affects mood. Scale affects comfort. Circulation affects stress.
In digital products, we do the same thing — just invisibly.
Reluma started there. Together with my teammate Fátima, I set out to design something that did the same job a well-proportioned room does, just on a phone. Not another productivity app. Not another habit tracker. A product for professionals who function fine on the outside and carry the tension somewhere else.
The goal was never to eliminate stress. It was to interrupt it.
STRESS IS CYCLICAL. NOT CONSTANT.
Headspace, Calm, BetterMe, Wysa, all built on the same assumption: that the user has time and bandwidth to sit with the app. That's a fair assumption at 7am or before bed. It's the wrong one at 2:43pm between a difficult Slack message and a calendar invite you weren't expecting.
Our insight was different. Professionals don't always need immersion. They need interruption — something that fits between a meeting and a deadline, not after them.
That gap became Reluma's positioning: micro-interventions for real work pressure, not just end-of-day wind-downs.
Research
We ran interviews with six working professionals across different roles and cities. Patterns emerged quickly, stress wasn't constant, it was cyclical. It spiked before meetings, looped after difficult conversations, and surfaced as rumination at night.
One line reframed the whole project for me: "I know what I should do. I just need something to interrupt the spiral."
This mattered because it changed the product brief. We weren't designing new behaviors, we were structuring ones users already reached for instinctively: stepping away, breathing, talking it out. The behavior already existed. The product just had to give it shape.
To validate this qualitatively, we ran a survey with 71 respondents. The findings confirmed what interviews suggested:
80% said work and studies were the area where they felt stress most acutely — more than relationships or time management.
44% said they could realistically invest 5–10 minutes in stress relief during the workday. Not an hour. Not even twenty minutes.
69% wanted personalised recommendations over generic content, and 50% preferred voice-enabled features — particularly during high-anxiety moments when typing feels impossible.
That last finding directly shaped one of my specific design decisions, which I'll come back to.
THE PRODUCT SHOULDN'T ADD TO THE LOAD.
The persona work pointed at Lukas: 31, product manager in Berlin, externally capable, internally tense. Mapping his day surfaced three recurring pressure points, morning anticipation, mid-day spike, evening rumination.
So I aimed for navigating the app by those moments instead of by feature category. "Start the Day, During Work, Unwind the Day" instead of "Meditate, Track, Journal." It's a small reframe with a real consequence: when someone opens the app at 2:43pm, they don't have to decide what kind of tool they need. The product already knows what part of the day they're in.
Every feature must earn its place
With the structure clear, I led ideation using the MoSCoW method to prioritise features. The focus was on avoiding feature bloat, a real risk in wellness apps where "more options" can feel like more pressure.
The must-haves I prioritised were an emotional check-in, three-minute resets tied to specific work situations (meeting prep, inbox overwhelm, heated conversation), a voice reflection feature for recording thoughts without typing, and a simple dashboard showing stress patterns over time.
Low-fidelity testing
surfaced an obvious-in-hindsight problem: the panic button. I'd made it large and visually dominant because it felt important. Testers told me it made the home screen feel alarming, like the app was bracing them for a crisis rather than offering a pause. I cut its visual weight and moved it to a swipe gesture, still accessible, no longer the first thing you see.
The breathing exercise had a different issue. Users weren't sure when to inhale versus exhale, so a screen designed to slow them down was instead asking them to figure something out. Timed cues fixed it. A reset shouldn't ask the user to think.
refining the experience
Mid-fidelity testing
exposed a different problem. I'd overloaded the home screen, two things competing on one surface, profile and dashboard, fighting for the same attention an anxious user doesn't have to spare. Splitting them was a one-day fix that quietly changed how the whole app felt on open. I also bumped the bottom-nav labels up in size, since small labels on a calm screen still read as friction.
I added a gradient focus layer to the calming practice screen, too. The earlier version had no visual immersion, and users reported feeling like they were reading instructions rather than experiencing a reset.
One decision worth pulling out: voice reflection. During interviews, one participant said she couldn't imagine typing when her body was nervous. That stuck with me. In the final design, I made voice the primary input method for the morning check-in and end-of-day unwind, with typing as the secondary option, not the other way around. A small hierarchy shift, directly answering the emotional state the user would actually be in when they opened the app.
Designed to regulate, not stimulate
The high-fidelity prototype
opened with a calm home screen and a simple emotional check-in. No dashboards. No metrics at the entry point. Just acknowledgment, because users needed to feel supported before they were measured.
The navigation followed emotional flow: check-in to reset to reflection to insight. The three-minute reset was the central interaction. Slow transitions, controlled motion, short spaced instructions, all designed to regulate pace rather than demand attention.
After each reset, users received a grounded affirmation. No gamified reward. No streak counter. Just closure. The voice reflection screen reduced visual noise entirely while recording, because the feature existed to externalise mental loops, and everything on screen competed with that.
The visual system had one job: feel regulated. Muted blues so nothing in the palette spikes. Rounded components because corners read as decisions, and decisions are what tired people are out of. Figtree because the letterforms have weight without sharpness.
Accessibility starts at the first decision
Accessibility testing caught two issues I then fixed. The toolbar font was 8px bold, which failed readability standards. I changed it to 12px medium. A secondary text colour also failed contrast requirements. I replaced it with a darker shade from the same blue family.
These felt like small fixes, but they shifted how I think about accessibility. Not as a final checklist, but as a constraint to design within from the start. The colour palette should be tested before it's applied, not after.
Desirability testing using Microsoft Reaction Cards returned words like calm, clean, intuitive, friendly, and reliable. One participant described it as complex, a fair response, and a useful reminder that simplification is never finished. Even a product designed to reduce overwhelm can add to it if the options aren't clear enough.
You can’t wireframe your way out of emotion
Designing Reluma changed how I think about UX.
The real problem wasn't the interface. It was what users felt when they opened it. And you can't wireframe your way out of an emotion.
Two things I'd do differently. I'd bring accessibility in at the palette stage, not after, since by the time you're testing contrast on hi-fi screens you're already arguing with sunk cost. And I'd spend more time on onboarding, since users felt the calm but a few of them didn't understand the structure on first open, which is a problem when your whole product premise is reducing cognitive load.
The biggest lesson was that designing for emotional regulation means the product itself has to feel regulated. Every transition, label, and piece of microcopy either adds to the load or reduces it. Nothing is neutral.
Three minutes may seem small. But sometimes that's enough to change the course of a day.
