UI design for Sound Off
In 2021, I co-founded and launched an iOS app for mindful audio journaling. The app allowed a user to record private voice notes, in which they ‘sound off’ about their day.
With my co-founder, we defined the brand, product strategy and business model. I designed the interface and user experience, iterating on it with rounds of usability testing and creating high-fidelity dev-ready Figma screens.
I also ran week-long diary tests with friends & family to validate the concept of audio journaling, and, later on, worked closely with our offshore development partner to launch the first version of the app.
My contribution (as a designer)
Concept exploration and research
Low-fidelity exploration
Remote usability testing
High-fidelity screens and prototype
The team
2 × co-founders
1 × brand agency
Project length
4 months
The problem
Sound Off aims to give users the same benefits as other mindfulness activities: reducing anxiety and increasing self-awareness, with secondary benefits such as better concentration and sleep from having a clear mind.
Using voice notes aimed to solve the main problem that many young people face with meditation and journaling: it's hard to stay motivated and keep a consistent practice.
The app had to solve these challenges, and moreover, needed to have a great aesthetic appeal and be incredibly simple to use
The design process
I started by creating a series of low-fidelity clickable prototypes. Using these, I ran four rounds of usability tests with friends, iterating on the prototype each time. These tests were designed to confirm that our core journeys were intuitive to work through.
The core journeys were:
recording a voice note
labelling it with a ‘mood gradient'
playing a recording back
favouriting a recording
listening to a voice guide that moved in
At the same time, I ran a diary study, where we asked people to record private voice notes on their phone using the in-built recording app, with very simple text-prompts that we'd send on WhatsApp each day. This ‘concierge MVP' helped us to understand behaviours people had while recording.
We made substantial changes after getting feedback from both usability test participants and diary study participants:
We learnt that listening back to recordings rarely happened, and when we asked people to they didn't enjoy hearing their own voice. After hearing about this, we simplified the past recordings screen into a single tab — initially it was split into two tabs, one with featured recordings called ‘Memories' (like in the Apple Photos app), and one with all recordings.
We learnt that not everyone used the voice guide to sound off. The first iterations had a voice guide widget slide in on the home screen. Following feedback, we moved the voice guides into it's own dedicated section, separate from recording.
We learnt that the record button was not intuitive enough — our record screen had very little on it, so most people figured out how to use it, but based on this feedback we added a tooltip saying 'tap to Sound Off' to make it obvious.
High-fidelity design
I created high-fidelity screens based on all of our testing. We had engaged a branding agency to create a logo, wordmark and colour palette, so I used those as a starting point.
The app had to feel calming — so we did away with an intimidating red recording button and a live timer, and instead had concentric circles while recording, which showed your microphone was working and picking up sound in a relaxing way.
As we decided to launch on iOS exclusively, we used a lot of design patterns common to native iOS apps — in particular following Apple's Notes and Mail apps. It was my first time designing exclusively for iOS, and I quickly discovered (and fell in love with) the huge community of brilliant designers that work only on native apps for iPhones.
As we added more voice guides which prompted a user on what to talk about, we also leaned on high quality stock imagery, to make each one feel unique.
At this stage, I again turned the designs into a clickable prototype and ran more usability tests. This was important for catching things we'd missed at the low-fidelity stage. One main source of confusion was labelling a recording using a colour that represented a mood. We added a colour wheel to signify this at the end of a recording, which was similar to Instagram's colour wheel UI element that changes a colour preparing to post a story.
After the designs were done, I created a detailed redline document and broke down each journey into epics and then into user stories for our development agency.
From here I transitioned into working primarily on delivery. I ran daily standups with our dev team who were in Romania, creating and exporting design assets where needed.
This was the hardest part of the process. We had lots of implementation challenges, ranging from small layout issues, where screens wouldn't scroll correctly and blurs and overlays didn't match our Figma file, to foundational issues, such as recording through headphones not using the correct microphone, or iCloud sync not working and files getting lost forever.
We ran well beyond our initial timelines, but managed to get a first version working and eventually launched it to the app store.
Pivoting
Midway through development, my co-founder became convinced that the app’s success lay in having a large library of guidance tracks that helped you sound off each day — effectively changing our app from being a utility (voice recorder) to a content library app (similar to Headspace).
Part of the justification for this decision rested in the change in business model — it would make it easier to justify a recurring subscription charge instead of one-off app download fees.
However, this decision was untested. Our diary tests with friends and family focussed more on recording audio: we had only provided text prompts, not audio prompts. It also meant there would need to be fundamental changes to how the company was run: we would need to invest lots into regularly producing new content for the app.
These decisions also happened during the app's development, meaning I was tasked with updating screens for voice guides, and changing how our Flamelink CMS was structured, in order to support new fields.
Outcome & learnings
The biggest challenges arose from our co-founder dynamic and our hard limit on capital. We tried hard to stick to the MVP mantra, but also wanted to have a beautiful, well-designed product. One piece of advice which people told us, but we hadn't fully embraced, was that if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. By the time our app launched on the app store it was both beautiful and far less buggy than early versions of it, but at that point the app design and development and gone so far in one direction that we couldn't afford changing direction or investing in more testing.
I stepped away from Sound Off after 9 months in March 2021, leaving my co-founder to continue bug-fixing, iterating and creating new voice guide content.
More than anything, this experience taught me the value of:
validating all decisions
failing fast and changing direction as early as possible
being absolutely ruthless about cutting features, leading only with what's minimally viable
If we'd spent longer testing with concierge MVPs and validated our pricing structure, we may have ended with something that had product market fit. However, at the same time, we had already delayed development significantly, and it was important to get something live that we could test and measure the success of.
I relished being a startup founder — it was a transformative experience that shaped my professional growth and the way I think about designing products and software. It was a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows, but the experience taught me invaluable lessons about resilience and adaptability., and the importance of listening to feedback. I learned to trust my instincts while also being open to constructive criticism and constantly seeking ways to improve.