✦ RELUMA
Micro-Resets for Professionals Who Never Really Switch Off — Wellbeing & Self-Care App
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.
team
Nouran Mansour, Fátima Abel Couceiro
duration
2 weeks
role
UX Researcher & UI Designer
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 from that reflection. Together with my teammate Fátima, we set out to design not another productivity tool, but something that regulates emotional space — specifically for professionals who perform well on the outside, yet carry quiet tension underneath.
The goal was never to eliminate stress. It was to interrupt it.
STRESS IS CYCLICAL. NOT CONSTANT.
We started by looking at existing wellness apps — Headspace, Calm, BetterMe, Wysa. They all offered something valuable. But they all assumed time and emotional bandwidth that most professionals simply don't have mid-workday. Their model was immersion: long sessions, habit streaks, daily commitment.
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 existed. It just lacked structure.
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.
From the research, I mapped Lukas — our primary persona. A 31-year-old product manager in Berlin. Externally capable, internally tense. His stress doesn't stop him from functioning, but it affects his clarity and confidence, especially before high-stakes moments.
Mapping Lukas' day revealed three recurring emotional touchpoints: morning anticipation, mid-day pressure, and evening rumination. Rather than building around feature categories, I proposed structuring the navigation around these emotional moments: Start the Day, During Work, Unwind the Day. This was a deliberate decision — navigation that mirrors how people actually experience their day reduces cognitive load at exactly the moment users need the app most.
Every feature must earn its place
With the structure clear, I led ideation using the MoSCoW method to prioritise features. My 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
revealed the first round of real issues. The panic button was visually too dominant — its size and weight made the home screen feel alarming rather than supportive. I reduced its visual weight and moved it to a swipe gesture so it was accessible without being the first thing users saw. The breathing exercise also lacked rhythm — users weren't sure when to inhale versus exhale. I added timed guidance cues, which turned a static screen into something that actually felt like a reset.
refining the experience
Mid-fidelity testing
showed the homepage felt crowded and the bottom navigation labels were too small. I separated the profile from the dashboard, gave each its own screen, and increased the nav bar label size. I also added a gradient focus layer to the calming practice screen — the earlier version had no visual immersion, and users reported feeling like they were just reading instructions rather than experiencing a reset.
One specific decision worth highlighting: the voice reflection feature. 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 a secondary option — not the other way around. This small hierarchy shift directly addressed the emotional state users would 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 → reset → reflection → 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 or 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 — muted blues, soft pastels, rounded components, Figtree typography — wasn't just aesthetic. Each choice was tied to a feeling: calm but not passive, modern but not cold.
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.
If I could do it again, I’d bring accessibility into the process earlier, starting from the colour palette, not at the end. I’d also push for clearer onboarding. Users felt the calm, but not everyone understood the structure right away.
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.
