Competitors focused on audio, often neglecting UI/UX.
There were no wellness apps that were also games.
Onboarding was often long and laborious. Many apps block users with a paywall.
I was surprised at the (often) low quality of the meditations, music, and nature sounds.
We saw a gap in the market for an experience that was playful as well as mindful.
Other research
Informally, I tested with friends and family. There is merit in moving fast to release and learn, but I wish I did more research and testing.
Since 2019, I have learned the error of my ways! Check out some of my other work!
Design progression
(Slide 1) Sketches
(Slide 2) Wireframes
(Slides 3-4) Design iteratins
(Slide 5) We had big dreams for Soundbed. Here are some of the features that didn't make the cut.
The build
After months of fumbling, I hired two engineers, and we started building the game in Unity.
Our ambition to build and release a beta in 9 weeks. The build took at least 4 months.
I built static UI elements in Unity. Cody built the garden, and Adam built the listening experience.
Final designs
I made a long-form commercial. (This is a rough cut, and the audio wasn't final.)
Users earn seeds by listening to music and meditations. They swipe to navigate their garden. They spend seeds to plant flowers.
I made this intro animation for when users first open the app.
I created cover artwork for our release albums. My partners produced all the music and sounds.
I painted dozens of flower assets.
How'd it turn out?
My partners were determined to build a mixed reality app instead of releasing our mobile app. I left and joined Neighbor Storage.
Reflection
It would have been wise to bring on an additional partner, an engineer or product manager. Two of my partners were music producers, and the other was an investor.
This meant that most responsibilities fell on me. I had to learn how to hire and recruit engineers, manage a brand new product, produce marketing materials, and lots more.
The wellness space is saturated. We knew that, but it would have been wise to understand the market potential better. In the end, they never released the app anyway, though.
I was not experienced enough to manage the build. Toward the end of the beta, we seemed to reach a crawl, and I didn't know how to spur things along.
Hiring engineers was messy. My lack of experience hiring engineers led to wasted months.
All things considered, I'm impressed with what we made!
I learned many of the pitfalls of building a brand new product. Since then, this has helped me on nearly every project (e.g. to question assumptions and biases.)
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