Bringing a world-class meditation studio experience to the people who'd never visit one
Inscape is a luxurious Manhattan yoga studio, but the former app did not convey the same luxurious feeling in the digital universe. Additionally, the former app was not able to seamlessly transition customers from the the digital to the physical, and was not working as a way of customer acquisition.
THE CHALLENGE
Inscape opened in New York's Flatiron district in late 2016 as one of the most thoughtfully designed physical spaces in the city — a 6,000 square foot meditation studio conceived as a gradual transition from Manhattan's streets into a completely different state of mind. Bamboo dome rooms. Curated aromatherapy. Sound environments designed by specialists. It was meditation reimagined for modern urban life, and it was exceptional.
The app told a different story.
The digital experience didn't match the physical one — in quality, in tone, or in ambition. For a brand whose entire proposition was that meditation could feel luxurious, considered, and genuinely transformative, an app that felt generic was a brand problem as much as a product problem. And there was a deeper challenge beneath that: the majority of people who would use the app had never meditated before. The physical studio could guide them through that transition in person. The app had to do it alone, on a phone, in competition with every other notification fighting for the same attention.
Laying down what 'Inscaping' means.
Explorations around users who are following a series vs doing freeform sessions.
MY ROLE
I was the Lead UX Designer on this engagement, working under the Creative Director, and responsible for the core experience design across four areas: onboarding for non-meditators, session browsing and discovery, the journal and progress tracking features, and the smart recommendation and personalisation UX.
Explorations for a innovative ways to onboard users
THE OMNICHANNEL PROBLEM
Inscape's physical space worked because of transition. You didn't walk off the street into a meditation dome — you passed through a retail area, a lounge, a gradual dimming of light and sound, until you arrived somewhere that felt genuinely separate from the city outside. The app had no equivalent of that journey. You opened it and were immediately confronted with a library of content, no context, and no guide.
The brief was to design an onboarding experience that replicated that transition — not through literal imitation of the physical space, but by finding its digital equivalent. What does it feel like to arrive somewhere that takes your wellbeing seriously? How do you communicate that in the first thirty seconds of an app experience?
The answer was progressive, intentional disclosure: a series of questions that felt like a conversation rather than a form, establishing the user's experience level, intentions, and available time before surfacing any content. First-time meditators were guided differently from returning practitioners. The app met people where they were, not where Inscape wished they were.
THE DISCOVERY PROBLEM
Inscape's head of product described it clearly: they didn't want to be like Netflix, where you spend longer choosing than actually watching. The content library was rich and growing — multiple meditation techniques, varying lengths, different intentions — and that richness was becoming a barrier. Users who weren't sure what they needed defaulted to nothing.
The solution was a daily single recommendation — one meditation, surfaced based on the time of day, the user's history, and their stated intentions — alongside a browsing architecture that organised content by what it would do for you rather than what type of meditation it was. The smart recommendation logic was powered by an algorithm Inscape had built; my job was to design the interface that made that intelligence feel like a personal suggestion rather than a machine output.
THE IMPACT
The redesigned app was featured by Apple as Best New App and subsequently recognised for Best New App Update — two separate Apple editorial features, reflecting both the launch quality and the improvement over time. The work received two W3 Gold Awards and a Webby nomination.
Commercially: paid subscriber base grew 2.5x from 2017 to 2018. 50% of users listened to more than one meditation per day. 60% of users started or ended their day with Inscape — a habit-formation metric that reflects directly on the onboarding and daily recommendation design. The app was covered by Vogue, New York Magazine, and FastCo Design.
NOTE: Full case study and process detail available on request.
