Stil

At a glance

• Sector: wellness — sleep, meditation and guided audio.
• Platforms: iOS app, supported by a custom CMS for the recording catalogue.
• What we did: product definition, UX and UI design, iOS development, custom CMS build, and a content architecture handling multiple artists and multiple languages.
• Timeline: four months of development.
• Made with: award-winning Game of Thrones actor Laura Pradelska, as the world’s first customisable sleep app.

The challenge

Sleep and meditation apps serve a moment almost no other product has to. The app is opened in the dark, in bed, one-handed, by somebody already half asleep, with the phone close to the face at the lowest brightness the screen allows. Bright surfaces, dense navigation and small tap targets stop working the second the lights go off.

Success is inverted, too. Most products optimise for time in the app; here the goal is for someone to stop looking at the screen within a minute or two. Every extra tap between opening the app and audio playing counts as a failure.

Audio then has to be dependable in a way an ordinary screen never is. Playback must survive the phone locking, the app backgrounding, an incoming call, and hours of continuous play overnight. Audio that stops silently at 2am breaks the product at the moment the listener is least able to fix it.

Dark is the default rather than a mode: palette, contrast and brightness are chosen for a dark room first and a lit one second. And onboarding gets one chance, because somebody who cannot sleep will not persevere with an app that has not helped by the end of the first night.

On top of that sat the problem specific to this project. Most sleep apps ship in English only, with a single voice and tonality — and what one person finds soothing another finds irritating.

What we designed

The app opens with a short sleep intake rather than a marketing carousel. It asks what is actually going wrong — trouble getting to sleep, trouble staying asleep — and every answer exists to shape a recommendation rather than build a profile. Those answers feed a recommendation layer mapping the stated problem onto the recording types in the catalogue: meditation, hypnosis, affirmation, adventure, story and more.

Customisation then takes over. Users choose the media, the artist and the language, so the same format can arrive as a softly spoken female voice or a husky southern cowboy, in the language the listener thinks in.

The player was designed for the dark: twilight colours, low-luminance surfaces, generous tap targets and a stripped-back layout, with the night-time controls within reach of one thumb. Playback keeps running when the phone is locked and the app is backgrounded, with lock-screen controls so nobody has to unlock and hunt for stop.

Behind it, a custom CMS lets the team upload and organise recordings across artists, languages and categories, and publish without shipping an app update.

Results

Stil shipped as an iOS app with a custom CMS behind it, over four months of development. It launched with a catalogue spanning several recording formats — meditation, hypnosis, affirmation, adventure and story — across different artists and languages, with a twilight-coloured interface built for a dark bedroom.

We are not publishing download, rating or revenue figures for this project. Stil is a relaxation and sleep-support product rather than a medical one, and neither the app nor this case study claims clinical or therapeutic sleep outcomes.

Frequently asked

How do you design an app people use in the dark?

Design for the dark room first and check the lit room afterwards. That means a genuinely dark palette rather than an inverted light one, muted contrast so nothing glares at minimum brightness, large targets for imprecise half-asleep taps, and as few screens as possible between opening the app and audio playing. Be restrained with motion and notifications; anything startling undoes the point.

How do you handle audio playback and backgrounding?

Background audio has to be designed in from the start. On iOS that means declaring the background audio capability, configuring the audio session so playback continues through a screen lock and behaves correctly when a call or another app interrupts, and exposing lock-screen and Control Centre controls with the right track information. It also means planning for long unattended sessions: sensible buffering and caching, timers that fade rather than cut, and predictable behaviour when the battery is low or the network drops mid-recording.

What makes a meditation app one people stick with?

Fit and fresh content. Fit comes from letting people choose the voice, the format and the language instead of assuming one narrator suits everyone — the reason Stil was built around customisation. Fresh content comes from the unglamorous half of the project: a CMS the team can actually use, so new recordings, artists and languages keep arriving without an app release.