I was one of three on the Lumosity design team leading the initiative to redesign the entire end-to-end experience for the company’s flagship product. Over a period of about 18 months, I worked on and delivered prototypes, UX flows and production UI for every surface of the web product. The new app successfully launched in 2025 to a global user base of 100+ million subscribers.
01 — BACKGROUND
A decade-old product with a brand new experience
Lumosity had spent years building one of the most recognizable brain training platforms in the world, with millions of subscribers and a library of over 40 cognitive games backed by real science. When this initiative launched, the product had outgrown its visual language, user experience and technical architecture.
I had been at Lumos Labs for a couple of years at this point, growing from a Senior Designer into a Lead Product Designer, earning increasing responsibility across several teams. Two years before this initiative started, I was part of the marketing and brand teams where we refined the brand architecture and identity as part of the initial product refresh that would set the visual tone for the new product.
02 — THE STAKES
Redesigning a product that people are actively using every day
The initiative was full of risk. The original codebase was complex and showing its age. The product was live with active subscriptions, and retention was a constant business priority. A misstep in our decisions could translate directly into churn at a scale the company could not afford.
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 cross-functional collaboration with engineering and the games team throughout all phases of design, production, and post-launch. In practice, that meant working directly alongside developers year-round, testing designs on a staging server, pairing on feature builds, and fixing bugs in production.
03 — DECISIONS
An entire application, rebuilt as one coherent system for web and mobile customers
We kept users at the center of every decision, starting from a well-defined foundation: established personas, documented pain points, and a clear set of user needs built up over years of customer research. We leveraged app store reviews, surveys and conversations with our CX team as a continuous signal. All three designers collaborated on the UX, ensuring decisions were shared and reviewed.
Mid-way during the redesign we launched a stripped-down beta version of the web app that had our most ambitious changes. Current users were invited to join the beta and participate in weekly live usability testing sessions. This feedback was used to confirm our design decisions.
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, the core game flow experience, stats pages, and more.
I co-led the design system with my counterpart, establishing design tokens, components, and patterns early. 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. In addition, I took the initiative to design a custom icon set of 80+ icons, each named, gridded, and componentized in Figma.
04 — OUTCOMES
A new product experience for users across the globe
The launch was executed as a phased rollout, beginning in Asian markets with a smaller subscriber base to validate the experience before wider release. I supported the developer handoff and early QA through that first phase, working closely with engineering to catch issues before they reached a larger audience.
The redesign shipped in 2025 to Lumosity's full global subscriber base and can be expereinced today on the web or in the app store.. The interaction patterns, the design system, and the UI decisions from this initiative are what people use every time they open the app.
05 — LOOKING BACK
Zooming out from the screen to the whole experience
This initiative capped several years of growth for me at Lumos Labs. It started with my early work across brand and product exploration, then grew into leading design on the company’s most complex, highest-stakes project. I wasn’t just thinking about individual screens, but about the whole experience: how a user got here, what came before, what comes next, and how all of it reflects on the product and the brand as a whole. I also kept learning how to better work across functions and how to communicate design decisions to leadership. This habit of zooming out and designing for the full journey rather than just the screen or component in front of me continues to be one of the most important aspects of my practice.
