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Case study · NeuroNation

Rebuilding a meditation app from scratch, in five months

I inherited an MVP with a balloon, a professor, and a navigation problem. Here's how we kept the balloon, lost the professor, and relaunched Ease in two new markets.

Company
NeuroNation
Role
Product Lead
Date
January – May 2019
Based in
Berlin, Germany
5 months
from research to relaunch
2
new English-speaking markets launched
6
premium courses live by end of July, up from 1
A collage of the small, layered illustrated worlds from the Ease app — a desert with cacti, a striped lighthouse, an igloo, a moai statue, a cherry-blossom river, and a windmill, each with its own bird.
The worlds, up close — every course got its own hand-illustrated backdrop for the balloon to hover over, built to layer in new elements as sessions were completed.

The situation

NeuroNation's core product was a brain-training platform, alongside an MVP meditation app. I joined as PM to bring that app to the UK and US — but early user research made it clear the existing product wasn't ready to travel. It needed rebuilding, not translating, and we had five months to do it with a team of one full-stack developer, one graphic designer, and a UX agency in Poland.

What discovery actually found

I spent every Friday on user testing and interviews for the length of the project, and made sure my developer and designer sat in too — nothing replaces watching someone struggle with your product in real time. The existing app used a journey metaphor: courses represented as flags along a scrollable path, with a balloon leading the way. Users couldn't tell sessions apart and lacked context for what they were choosing. Customisation happened through a conversational interface with a professor character — built to reflect the company's academic partnership, but it tested badly with British and American users, who found it slow and gimmicky rather than credible.

We kept what worked — the colour scheme, the natural feel, and above all the balloon, which users genuinely loved — and rebuilt everything else:

  • A named, playlist-style session list replaced the horizontal flag-hunt across a map.
  • A single settings menu replaced the professor's conversational customisation flow.
  • The balloon kept its personality — users could recolour it — but instead of travelling a fixed path, it now hovered over a different animated world per course, gaining visual elements like rabbits or pine trees as sessions were completed.
Three Ease app screens: the initial course screen with a balloon over green hills, a new course screen with a yellow balloon titled Being Present, and another new course screen with a pink balloon over a coastal lighthouse titled Body Relaxation.
One balloon, many worlds — the same anchor character, recoloured and re-set into a different illustrated landscape for each course.
Microcopy, in practiceThe old settings screen asked "How much spoken guidance would you like?" I cut it to one word: "Guidance." Testing showed the shorter version reduced the reading burden without losing anyone.
Side-by-side comparison of the customisation screen: an early work-in-progress version asking full questions like How much spoken guidance would you like, next to the final design using single-word labels like Guidance.
Before and after — full questions became single-word labels once testing showed the shorter version read faster without confusing anyone.

Shipping with no dedicated QA

With no QA function, the whole company tested builds before release. I built a feedback-tracking document for the process — later wrote it up on Medium for other PMs facing the same gap — and used it to keep the signal usable instead of scattered across Slack threads.

We relaunched in May 2019 with two courses, one free and one premium, and grew the catalogue fast: six premium courses live by the end of July.

Side-by-side comparison of the course overview screen: the previous German-language version titled Kurse with a locked course, next to the new English version with Foundations and Body Relaxation courses, progress rings, and a lock icon on the premium course.
The course list, rebuilt — from a single German-language list to a browsable, English-first overview with visible progress and clear premium gating.

The voice problem nobody plans for

Writing and recording the meditation scripts meant translating my own German-language work into English — and discovering I do not have a meditation voice. Research pointed clearly at what English speakers found most relaxing: a deep male voice with a Scottish accent. We couldn't find a Scottish speaker, but landed a British voice actor with a Scottish grandparent, whose recordings — made over several Thursdays in a studio round the corner from the office — landed extremely well with users.

"We kept the balloon. We lost the professor. Users only missed one of them."
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