Hobbes Health App
Designing an AI-powered nutrition experience that makes healthy eating feel less like work
Designing a highly personalised, deliberately minimal meditation experience that gets out of the way
Designing a nutrition product that does more of the work
Hobbes is an AI-powered nutrition app that helps people eat better without making healthy eating feel like another thing they have to constantly manage.
Instead of asking users to plan every meal, manually log everything they eat and interpret a stream of nutritional data, Hobbes uses AI to take on some of that work. It can understand what you eat through conversation, create personalised meal plans, suggest small changes and help you see how your behaviour is changing over time.
I worked across the product experience, from the initial product thinking and information architecture to the core flows, AI interactions and visual system.
Understanding the space
How much should an AI decide on someone's behalf?
We started by looking at how existing nutrition and wellness products approached the problem.
A lot of them are built around tracking. You set a goal, search for your food, enter the quantity, look at your calories or macros and try to stay consistent. The products can be incredibly detailed, but that detail also means that the user ends up doing a lot of the work.
There was also a pretty clear emotional pattern. The more seriously people tried to track their health, the more the experience started to feel like something they could fail at. Streaks, dashboards and daily targets are useful for some people, but they can also turn a missed day into a reason to stop altogether.
We wanted Hobbes to take a different position.
Instead of asking, “How can we help people track their nutrition better?”, we started asking, “How much of this can the product take care of for them?”
What we heard from users
The biggest friction wasn't knowing what to eat. It was keeping up with the process.
These insights gave us a fairly clear direction: make the product easier to interact with, and make progress feel encouraging rather than evaluative.
So where could AI actually help?
We didn't want AI to be another feature. We wanted it to remove work.
Once we understood the friction, AI became interesting for a very specific reason. It could change the interaction model.
This led us to three ideas that became the foundation of the product: Talk to Track, Plan Don't Track, and a lighter approach to habit formation and progress.
Instead of searching through a food database, you could tell Hobbes what you ate. Instead of building a meal plan yourself, Hobbes could create one based on your goals and previous behaviour. Instead of navigating through multiple dashboards to understand your progress, you could simply ask a question.
The common thread between them was that Hobbes should be doing more of the thinking in the background, while the user interacts with it in a much more natural way.
Meditation itself is simple. The challenge was making the product equally simple.
We built the experience around the idea of quiet by design — reducing visual noise, limiting unnecessary choices, and creating a clear path from opening the app to beginning a session.
Every design decision had to answer one question: does this help the user focus, or does it compete for their attention?
The visual language was designed to reinforce the feeling we wanted the product to create: calm, warmth and focus.
We explored the seven chakras as a starting point for the colour system, using their associated colours to create distinct visual states across the experience. Rather than using colour purely as decoration, we used it to give different exercises and emotional states their own visual identity while keeping the overall interface cohesive.
Just Breathe
We wanted the first interaction to immediately communicate what Shvaas was about — no onboarding maze, no catalogue of sessions, just an invitation to breathe.
The opening experience uses a minimal interface and gentle visual cues to help users transition into the practice before introducing any additional information or controls.
Meditate Based on How You Feel
Rather than expecting users to know which meditation technique they need, we explored starting with how they were feeling.
Users could choose an emotional state and be guided towards a session suited to that moment. This made personalisation feel natural while reducing the cognitive effort of deciding what kind of meditation to do.
Rescue Sessions
Not every meditation session needs to be twenty minutes long. We designed short “rescue” sessions for moments when users needed to reset quickly — whether they were feeling overwhelmed, stressed or simply needed a pause.
The idea was to make meditation useful beyond a dedicated practice, by giving users something they could reach for in the middle of everyday life.
Together in tranquility
Meditation can feel difficult to start alone, especially for people who are new to the practice. We explored a shared meditation experience that allowed users to invite someone they trusted to join a guided session.
This introduced a social layer without turning meditation into a competitive or performative experience — the focus remained on creating a shared moment of calm.
Keep tabs on your growth
Consistency is often harder than starting. We introduced lightweight progress tracking to help users see their practice over time and create a sense of continuity.
The challenge was to use habit-forming mechanics without making meditation feel like a productivity task. Streaks and progress therefore acted as gentle reinforcement rather than pressure to perform.
See how well you're doing
Breathing is at the centre of the Shvaas experience, so we wanted users to understand more than simply how often they meditated.
By visualising breathing patterns over time, the experience could help users recognise changes in their practice and build a deeper awareness of how their breathing influenced their meditation.
If I have to take one thing away from this experience…
People associate meditation with the feeling of releasing or setting themselves free, being in a place of serenity, and experiencing tranquility. It was a challenge to design a simple and effective interface, the app narrows down all the user’s basic needs for meditation, making it extremely easy to navigate within – without having them to really sit and think about using the app.
It was interesting to learn that focusing on certain colors can promote healing in specific parts of the body. Color visualization can be a powerful tool in meditation due to the link between the seven colors of the light spectrum and the seven chakras.
There’s more to the story than what’s on this page. Reach out at anjalidarbha.work@gmail.com if you’d like to see the full case study.
Designed at https://www.humanx.io/