Headspace's redesign beautifully expands the core product

The meditation app, Headspace, started out as a way to meditate on-demand—users could pull up a quick 10-minute session to get a breather from their daily routine at the push of a button. In 2017, they redesigned their app to be a much larger part of their users' lives. They broke off their single-trajectory, basic guided series into a multiple-trajectory Basics series, and made dozens of specialized meditation tracks available for those times when you need something more specific to get you through your day. If a user feels anxious before a huge test or feels pissed off about something, there's a meditation session catered to that. 

Before the update, regular users might've habitually turned on their 10-minute session for the abstract sake of “meditating,” and non-habitual users would enter that same session, perhaps not knowing what the end goal should be. By making their product more nuanced, they open the app up to experiences that are situational and unique to each user, and they highlight these benefits in their onboarding.

Why this is really good UX:

• Headspace begins their product redesign tour with a gentle pop-up, encouraging users to explore the new meditation sessions available to them. Because this was a dramatic redesign, they introduce their new Library immediately to excite users and set the stage for the new options they will learn about.
• As users explore the newly designed app, they are presented with helpful tooltips that are embedded into the flow of each tab. These descriptive boxes offer what the new feature is and what it's useful for, highlighting their upgrade in customization for the individual user.
• The “Your Journey” section strategically serves as the hub for all these updates. Before the redesign, users meditated at the push of a button. With the redesign, users now have multiple tabs and meditation options to keep track of, meaning the app is more complicated. Headspace resolves this issue with the Journey section as it allows users to track their entirely new and personalized meditation process, while simplifying the elements of the redesign into one page.