“Balance’s onboarding is so frictionless, you’re meditating before you even realize it.” —juror Dan Mall

“Balance creates a soothing digital experience through simple instructions and lots of personalization. The onboarding experience alone put me at ease!” —juror Libby Bawcombe

Overview: Balance, built in-house at startup Elevate Labs, is the world’s first personalized meditation app. Users answer questions about themselves and their meditation experience, goals and preferences. Using an audio library of thousands of files, Balance then assembles a daily meditation for each user.

• It took two years to research, write, design and develop Balance, and Elevate Labs continues to work on new meditations and features each week.

• Balance currently uses about 8,000 video, image and audio assets.

• Balance is currently rated 4.83 on the Apple App Store and has more than 4,000 ratings.

Comments by Jesse Pickard, chief executive officer, Elevate Labs:
Are there any special navigational features? “After opening the app, customers are directed to the Today tab, which serves up daily recommendations. This eliminates the guesswork for learning meditation. The primary recommendation is a meditation that’s personalized based on a person’s app-wide progress and preferences. The other recommendations are grab-and-go meditations personalized based on things like time of day, goals and lifestyle.”

Are there any other technical features you’d like to call attention to? “None of the meditations in Balance are single audio files. Rather, they’re the product of the on-the-spot compilation of dozens of small audio clips. To achieve this, our engineering team devised proprietary technology that allows for this complex branching logic and still results in a seamless customer experience.”

What was the most challenging aspect of the project? “With Balance, both the visual flows and the audio meditations are personalized along multiple dimensions, like meditation experience, goals and answers to other daily questions. The challenge is in accounting for every possible path. This means creating multiple visual flows, each with their own illustration or animation, to explain meditation techniques in a way that makes sense for users with differing levels of experience and interest. For the meditations themselves, this means writing clips that similarly account for every possible question combination. On the technical side, this also required us to create a system that can seamlessly combine different audio clips into a single meditation.”