Stilla shipped in February with one screen, three sounds, and a single button. It almost shipped, three different times, with much more.
The brief was small in the only way that matters: build the calmest meditation app you can, and then make it calmer. The product team had spent two years watching their previous app accumulate features — streaks, courses, social, sleep stories — and feeling, with each addition, the soul of the thing slip a little further away.
We came in to design the next version. We could have, very easily, designed a better-looking version of what they already had. The good decision was the harder one: design the version that subtracted.
The cuts
Three things we cut, with brief notes on what they cost us and what they bought:
- Onboarding. We removed it twice. The first time it came back, in a quieter form. The second time it stayed gone. Stilla now opens directly to the app's only state. New users figure it out in roughly three seconds, which is also how long it would have taken them to skip the onboarding.
- Streaks. The product manager fought us on this one for three weeks. We won by counting: of the seven product complaints in the previous app's reviews, four were about streaks. Streaks were free anxiety, charged at zero dollars. We removed them.
- The sound library. We had built a system for forty-eight ambient tracks. We shipped with three. The other forty-five exist on the design team's hard drive, unused, and we expect to ship perhaps two more by the end of the year.
If subtraction is your method, the work is mostly emotional. The drawing is easy. The argument is hard.
What stayed
What stayed, in order of importance: silence, the breathing animation, the timer ring, the three sounds, and a small mark in the corner that returns you to the start. Everything else was either cut or never built.
The breathing animation is the only piece of motion in the entire app. It runs at four breaths per minute — slower than the user's, on purpose, so the user's pace falls toward it. The animation took six weeks. Almost all of that was removing things from it.
What we learned
The hardest part of designing a quiet app is not the design. It is the meeting. Every meeting is an invitation to add something. The product manager has an idea. The CEO has a friend who saw a thing. The data shows a number that could be higher. None of these are wrong, individually. Together they are a death of a thousand features.
The discipline of saying no, in those meetings, is what we were paid for. The drawing was the easy part.
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Stilla is available on iOS and Android. The team is small and quiet, like the app. See the project page →