ELEVATION is a holistic wellness and lifestyle platform designed to help people build healthier routines, improve work-life balance, and reconnect with their personal wellbeing in an increasingly digital and fast-paced world. Created as part of my graduate work in User Experience Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art, the project explored how design can support emotional wellbeing, habit formation, and sustainable lifestyle change through personalized and human-centered experiences.

Elevation was inspired by the growing mental, emotional, and social strain many people experienced during and after the COVID-19 pandemic—particularly the rise of burnout, social isolation, blurred work-life boundaries, and the overwhelming number of disconnected wellness tools competing for attention.

ELEVATION was a collaboration with two other designers AJ Mitchell and Lindsey Slutz. Our responsibilities often overlapped across research, strategy, and design, we all played a key role in helping guide the overall product vision, UX direction, interaction design, and visual experience of the platform. I also helped facilitate collaboration, align project priorities, and coordinate workflows across the team to ensure we maintained a cohesive product vision and successfully delivered the project from research through final presentation.

Research & Discovery

We conducted user interviews and secondary research to better understand how people experienced work-life balance, wellness, and personal growth in a post-pandemic environment.

Key Research Questions

• How do people currently manage work-life balance?

• What barriers prevent people from maintaining healthy routines?

• What emotional and behavioral challenges exist today?

• Where do existing wellness platforms fail users?

• How might technology better support long-term wellbeing?

Key Insights

Wellness Fatigue Is Real

Many users felt overwhelmed by the number of self-improvement tools and routines they were expected to maintain. Instead of simplifying life, some wellness products became another source of stress and pressure.

“Managing wellness started feeling like another full-time job.”

People Wanted Guidance, Not More Information

Users struggled less with access to resources and more with understanding:

• where to start,

• what mattered most,

• and how to build realistic habits that fit their lives.

This highlighted the importance of personalization, simplicity, and achievable progress.

Isolation Significantly Impacted Motivation

Many participants described losing social connection and accountability during remote work and pandemic isolation. Motivation often declined when goals and wellness activities felt disconnected from community and support systems.

Existing Experiences Were Fragmented

Users frequently jumped between:

• productivity tools,

• fitness apps,

• calendars,

• journaling platforms,

• and mindfulness products.

This fragmented ecosystem created friction, inconsistency, and cognitive overload.

Ideating the Solution

Using the insights we gained during our research, we came together as a team with a clear goal and outcome and ideated through an Opportunity Solution Tree workshop to come up with our solutions.

Product Strategy

Based on our research findings, we focused the product strategy around four core principles:

1. Holistic Wellbeing

Support emotional, physical, social, and lifestyle wellbeing together rather than treating them as isolated categories.

2. Sustainable Habit Formation

Encourage small, realistic, and achievable progress instead of productivity-driven perfectionism.

3. Personalized Guidance

Help users discover routines, resources, and recommendations tailored to their goals, lifestyle, and emotional needs.

4. Accountability Through Community

Create opportunities for social encouragement, shared progress, and motivation without introducing unhealthy comparison dynamics.

Designing the Experience

The experience was intentionally designed to feel:

• calm,

• approachable,

• supportive,

• and emotionally lightweight.

Rather than overwhelming users with dashboards and dense analytics, the platform emphasized clarity, encouragement, and achievable actions.

Scenarios & Storyboards

Riley the Hybrid Worker

Context scenario: Riley wants to check how he spends his time working from home and in person and reflect on changes he needs to balance his life.

Charli the Remote Worker

Context scenario: Chali is working on a big project at work and has neglected her self-care routine and activities as well as time with her family.

Designing the Solution

Onboarding is a critical process to enable ELEVATION to personalize user's experience best suited for their needs and lifestyle

Get insights and track time spent on work, self-care, family, and personal

Find activities, routines, advice, and guides on self-care and wellness in the Elevation Library.

Key Experience Areas

Personalized Wellness Dashboard

A centralized home experience that surfaces:

• goals,

• routines,

• recommendations,

• and progress tracking

based on each user’s preferences and behaviors.

Habit & Routine Building

Users could create manageable daily and weekly routines designed around sustainable progress rather than rigid productivity expectations.

Curated Wellness Library

A personalized content experience providing:

• wellness resources,

• guided activities,

• articles,

• and recommendations

tailored to individual goals and emotional needs.

Community & Accountability

The platform explored lightweight social accountability features that encouraged connection, motivation, and shared progress while minimizing social pressure and comparison.

Usability Testing & Iteration

Usability testing helped validate several key assumptions around:

• personalization,

• simplicity,

• and emotional usability.

Participants responded positively to:

• the platform’s calmer visual tone,

• integrated experience,

• and approachable structure.

Testing also revealed opportunities to:

• simplify onboarding,

• improve navigation clarity,

• reduce cognitive load,

• and better surface personalized recommendations earlier in the experience.

These findings informed multiple iterations across the information architecture and interaction flows.

Outcomes

ELEVATION demonstrated how digital products can move beyond traditional productivity and wellness paradigms to support more sustainable and emotionally-aware lifestyle experiences.

The project helped validate the importance of:

• holistic wellbeing design,

• emotionally intelligent UX,

• personalization,

• and community-centered accountability systems.

More importantly, the experience reinforced how thoughtful product design can help reduce friction, support healthier behaviors, and create more human-centered relationships with technology.

Reflection

ELEVATION became an important milestone in my growth as a product designer and product leader. The project challenged me to think beyond interfaces and focus more deeply on behavioral design, emotional usability, systems thinking, and long-term user outcomes.

It also reinforced a principle that continues to shape my work today:

The best products are not designed to maximize engagement alone—they are designed to meaningfully improve people’s lives.

Many of the product strategy, research, and systems-thinking approaches explored during ELEVATION later influenced how I approached larger-scale platforms and enterprise ecosystems in my professional work.