Spearheading the XP overhaul for the world's premier cognitive brain game platform
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01 — THE BACKGROUND
A decade-old product with a brand new brief
Lumosity had spent years building one of the most recognizable brain training platforms in the world, with over 100 million subscribers and a library of 40+ cognitive games backed by real science. By the time this initiative launched, the product had outgrown its visual language and user experience. I had been at the company for a few years at this point, growing from a contract Senior Designer into a Lead Product Designer, earning increasing responsibility across the product. This was the initiative that brought all of my previous work at Lumosity together.
02 — THE STAKES
Redesigning a live product that millions of people use every day
The initiative was full of risk; the original codebase was complex, the product was live with active subscriptions, and retention was a constant business priority. A misstep in the experience could translate directly into churn at scale. That pressure shaped every decision across the two years it took to complete the overhaul. We wanted to keep our users’ needs at the center of the experiences. We ran weekly usability tests on both the existing product as well as our new designs. We leveraged App Store reviews, surveys and conversations with our CX team as a continuous signal. We were always designing with our customers in mind and often with their immediate feedback.
03 — THE APPROACH
User research first and systems thinking from day one
We started from a well-defined foundation: established personas, documented pain points, and a clear set of user needs built up over years of customer research. All three designers collaborated on the UX, ensuring decisions were shared and defensible. In parallel, we established the design system architecture early, treating it as infrastructure rather than a cleanup task. A two-tier token system, covering scores of primitives mapping into component-level tokens with full light and dark mode support, gave us a shared foundation that could scale across web and mobile without drift.
04 — THE BUILD
Every surface for every state on every platform
I owned the web UI end to end, working alongside my counterpart who led the mobile UI. Together we covered onboarding, the daily workout, game browsing, game detail pages, performance insights, and the full game data experience. I also co-led the design system and built a custom icon set of 80+ icons, each named, gridded, and componentized in Figma. The game illustration library, composed of over 40 illustrated game identities, was produced with a dedicated illustrator and motion designer. My role there was art direction, consistency standards, and system integration.
05 — THE DELIVERY
Successfully shipped to millions of people
The launch was a phased global rollout, beginning in Asian markets with a smaller subscriber base to validate the experience before wider release. An added layer of complexity was that the games were built in Unity while the UI wrapper was native web and mobile. Making those two technologies feel like a single, coherent product required close collaboration with engineering throughout production and into QA. At all phases of the rollout, I supported the developer handoff, contributed to pre and post-launch QA, and stayed close to the build from production through delivery and launch.
