Breathing.ai
Breathing.ai is a wellness-focused startup building tools that help people feel better at work. Their platform uses biometric inputs to offer personalized, moment-to-moment support aimed at reducing stress and improving focus.
Client
Breathing.ai
Overview
In early 2023, I embarked on a project with Breathing.ai, a wellness-focused startup aiming to enhance employee well-being through technology. The mission was to evolve an existing open-source plugin into a comprehensive desktop wellness platform. This platform would empower organizations to monitor and support their employees' mental health by providing real-time biometric insights and personalized wellness recommendations.
Team
3 UX Researchers
6 Designers
2 Developers
1 CEO
Timeline
3.5 Months
Developer handoff
Accessibility support
Dashboard UI design
Component creation
Research
My Responsibilities
Process
1
Week 1
Ideation
The real value of the platform came from making wellness insights easy to understand, relatable, and genuinely helpful for both employees and HR teams
The early exploration centered around a few key questions:
Which wellness metrics would meaningfully help people make sense of their day-to-day well-being?
How could important information be surfaced clearly, supportively, and without overwhelming users?
Research & Interviews
To ground design decisions in real-world needs, interviews were conducted with professionals across companies of varying sizes from lean startups to large enterprises.
Conversations focused on three key questions:
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What wellness data is actually useful on a day-to-day basis?
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What privacy boundaries must be respected?
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How can information be surfaced clearly without overwhelming users?
The insights gathered here directly shaped how content was prioritized and structured within the dashboard.
2
Week 2-3
3
Week 4
Information Architecture
With insights gathered from interviews, the next step was to organize the platform’s core structure.
Key decisions included
With the structure mapped out and initial feedback from internal reviews, the next phase focused on building wireframes & high-fidelity prototypes to simulate real user interactions and validate the full experience before development began.
4
Week 5-7
Wireframing & Visual Design
Built low-fidelity layouts to define content hierarchy, user flows, and navigation structure. Applied brand styles, accessibility standards, and detailed interactions to bring the dashboard to life.
Outcome: Delivered a full set of screen flows, from low fidelity drafts to polished, accessible UI designs providing a clear blueprint for developers and stakeholders to understand layout logic, interaction intent, and visual direction.
5
Week 8-10
Prototyping & Testing
With the high-fidelity designs in place, this phase focused on simulating how the product would behave in real use. An interactive prototype was built using Figma to replicate core user flows from onboarding to navigating daily wellness insights.
Outcome: Identified friction points in navigation, improved the hierarchy of information, and adjusted interface elements for better readability and pacing. The refined prototype became the shared reference for stakeholder alignment and final pre-dev sign-off.
6
Week 11
Wrapping Up the Project
The project wrapped with a final internal review session, where we walked through the full interactive prototype with the broader Breathing.ai team — including product managers, developers, and marketing leads.
Learnings
Letting go of first ideas was harder than expected.
What seemed obvious at the start showing detailed biometric stats everywhere quickly overwhelmed users. I had to step back, rethink priorities, and focus only on the insights that actually mattered to everyday well-being.
Rough wireframes sparked better conversations than polished ones.
When early layouts looked too finished, people hesitated to give honest feedback. Working faster and sharing rougher drafts helped open up discussions, uncover better ideas, and move the design forward more naturally.
Editing was a bigger challenge than building.
Deciding what features, screens, and details to remove took more time and more conviction than adding new ones. Simplicity wasn’t automatic; it was something we had to deliberately work toward at every stage.
Trust was earned through small design choices, not major features.
It wasn’t complex graphs or detailed dashboards that made the platform feel supportive it was the subtle things: softer colors, clear typography, intuitive flows. Small decisions shaped the emotional tone of the entire experience.