Google Youth Advisor
Product & Graphics, senior at CalArts.
Born in NewJersey, raised in Seoul and Frankfurt.
Always curious about the world and ready to explore!
Most wellness apps hand you a playlist and ask you to relax on their terms. NiDO lets you stack three layers of sound into a soundscape that's yours, then breathe inside it with your phone resting on your belly.
Most sound and wellness apps are built around consumption. You open the app, pick from a curated list, and listen to what someone else decided was good for you. The experience is passive by design.
But sound is personal. The combination that helps one person sleep is completely different from what works for another, and it changes day to day. NiDO was designed around a different premise: what if your audio sanctuary was something you built, not something you were given?
The challenge was making an app that felt expressive and playful rather than clinical, while still serving real needs like sleep, focus, and stress relief.
Stress and poor sleep have become defining struggles for Gen Z and Millennials. Studies show 1 in 4 Gen Z individuals report chronic sleep difficulties, with stress as the primary driver. Research published in PLOS One found that ASMR reliably lowers heart rate and increases feelings of calm, validating sound as a genuine therapeutic tool.
But despite the science, the apps available today haven't caught up with how people actually want to use sound.
Calm
Headspace
Brain.fm
Endel
NiDO ✦Every app treats sound as content to deliver. None treat it as something to play with.
Two users who arrive from opposite directions — one wants creative depth, the other wants a ritual that doesn't feel like a chore.
Already uses ASMR and meditation daily. Finds existing apps limiting — she knows the soundscape she wants, she just can't build it anywhere.
Stressed, sleep-deprived, and new to meditation apps. Open to trying something as long as it doesn't feel like one more thing he's failing to keep up with.
The app should feel like something you want to explore, not a routine you're supposed to follow.
Sound isn't one-dimensional. NiDO lets users build in depth instead of just pressing play.
Haptic breathing roots the experience in the physical body. True calm is felt, not just heard.
Pathways give Daniel a guided entry point. The Nest gives Naisha creative freedom. Both users are served by the same app.
Everything in NiDO comes back to the same premise: you are the one building the sanctuary.
Stack up to three layers of sound and control each layer's volume independently with a sliding interface. The interaction is the point — mixing your soundscape is tactile, playful, and personal in a way that choosing from a list never is.
Browse new sounds daily, organized by category — nature, urban, ambient, frequencies, music, and triggers — or send a request for a specific sound you want to hear tomorrow. Users can save tracks to each layer of their Nest and find them later in their library. The library stays fresh, and users have a hand in what gets added to it.
Guided sessions that run over days or weeks — Sleep Reset, Daily Lightup — building a ritual around a specific moment in your day. Structured enough for a beginner, meaningful enough for someone who's been at it for months.
Choose a breathing pattern and rest your phone on your belly. The haptics pulse with each inhale and exhale, giving you a physical anchor to follow while the sounds play. It's the one feature in NiDO you feel before you hear.
4 seconds in, 6 seconds out — the pattern used in Sleep Reset.
Deep charcoal grounds the interface; warm amber and orange gradients carry the feeling of last light. Soft purple marks the moments that belong to the body rather than the ear.
A modern serif carries the app's name and section titles; a clean sans handles everything that needs to be read quickly. The contrast keeps the warmth of the color system from tipping into softness.
Five screens carry the product: where you start, where you build, where you breathe, where you commit, and where you find what's next.
Onboarding
The Nest
Haptic Breathing
Pathways
Discovery
NiDO started from a simple question: can a wellness app be genuinely fun? The Nest was the seed of the whole project — sliding through layers of sound the way you'd mix a track felt playful and satisfying in a way that opening a playlist never does. Everything else grew outward from that one interaction.
Designing solo over five weeks meant the concept moved fast, but it also means the riskiest ideas haven't met a real user yet.