“We are a deep breath in our users’ day” Ken Seeno, Headspace

Published in

Mozza.io

4 min readJul 4, 2019

Headspace is the world leader in meditation apps with more than 50M users. The app’s mindful user experience has become a major influence for designers around the world. As part of our wellness interview series, we asked Headspace Lead Product Designer’s Ken Seeno to answer our questions.

What does your product team look like?

We create multidisciplinary squads for each new product initiative. Each squad is made of a Product Manager and, depending on the type of project, some of our designers, developers, Customer Service representatives and/or Data people.

Are you working closely with mindfulness experts?

Our cofounder Andy is our meditation guide. He’s a former monk who has been teaching mindfulness in a Great Britain clinic. We regularly do meetings with him to get insights during the product development process.

Andy Puddicombe cofounded Headspace in 2010.

But he’s far from being the only one passionate about meditation at Headspace. A good part of our team members meditate at their desk or in one of the silent rooms designed for this in our office. On top of that, we organize a group meditation twice daily and go together on mindful runs.

What’s your process to get insights from your users?

Whatever means we have are good. We read all the emails that our users send us, conduct interviews in person and remotely and use surveys to get more of quantitative insights. If we were not building the app for people, all our work would be useless. So we try to hear from them as much as we can.

What is the most important principle you follow when designing?

We are big on accessibility: our app needs to be approachable and accessible. It shall never be stressful to use. We want it to be a deep breath in our users’ day. We stay mindful of this when designing so that the color palette, the amount of copy and the nature of imagery all reflect this feeling.

What is the part of your work you’re the most proud of?

I’ve been working on our design system for the past few years. It’s like Lego blocks for our designers. I’m really proud of how this enables the team to experiment new thing while staying coherent and keeping its laid-back atmosphere.

Sneak peek at Headspace’s design system on Figma.

Is there a feature you planned but eventually decided not to do?

Yes. At one point, we wanted to simplify the experience so much, that we would only keep only one set of possible activities. There was only one meditation session left to do each day. The aim was to remove the stress you can have if you’re facing too many choices.

In the end, we thought this UX would remove too much of the app possibilities. But we kept a good part of this approach for our next release!

Can you tell us 3 apps that you personally love?

Sweetgreen: I use the app very often at work. It’s easy to use and their delicious salads are delivered directly in the Headspace kitchen.

Apple Photos: I’m very excited about the last update. I use to shoot a lot of pics. Now that I have so many photos, it’s becoming hard to look back at all of them. The way they’re now surfacing memories is really interesting.

ProtoPie: We use this prototyping software at Headspace, and the companion app is amazing. It has this mirroring function to display prototypes with animations, sounds and even haptic feedback!