Elevate - Brain Training

Elevate is a mobile app that builds confidence in hard-skills. Users train in reading, writing, listening and math with over 30 dynamic games and puzzles designed as bite-sized exercises for the growing mind.

I joined the founding team at Elevate to kickstart a fresh direction for the company. As the sole product designer, I worked closely with the CEO and the art team to develop the end-to-end product vision and establish the overall product experience.

Elevate is a mobile app that builds confidence in hard-skills. Users train in reading, writing, listening and math with over 30 dynamic games and puzzles. Our goal was always to create an app that genuinely improves people's lives in a measurable way. Progress and challenges are personalized based on performance and behavior, this minimizes the frustrations that most users encounter in traditional learning experiences.

The biggest design challenge while working on Elevate was how best to unify the experience across learning categories, making it easier for users to expand their personal boundaries. The brain learns best when it's at play, and we leveraged this concept every step of the way.

Here we'll explore a few of the building blocks that make up the core Elevate experience and how some of those decisions were made.

After a long discovery process, we discarded several childish font options and opted for the more utilitarian typeface, DIN. Along with some elegant sound design, DIN serves as the encouraging voice and sturdy backbone of Elevate.

The typographic characteristics have a clear influence on the interface's geometric soul. We looked for ways to remove distractions from the user while they performed complex tasks, as a result, the art of Elevate is intentionally primitive. Each game is crafted with beautiful particle effects and geometry that's a wonder to see in motion.

We worked closely with educators and testers to determine the skill level of all in-game content. Based on this exploration, we designed a solution for tracking user's standings across every learning category, effectively giving them an opportunity to investigate their strengths and weaknesses, brush up on complex concepts, or to simply explore their personal development over time.

We spent close to 14 months ideating, developing, and fine tuning Elevate. Over the course of the journey, we encountered obstacles that we hadn't foreseen at the outset, like the need to build a custom game engine, or to partner with a sound designer for the sonic qualities they could bring to the table.

We launched Elevate on iOS, with an Android release a few weeks later. Shortly after launch Apple selected Elevate as The App of Year in over 30 english speaking countries. The app has been downloaded over 50 million times, has attracted the attention of major news publications, and consistently ranks in the top 5 apps in the Education category of the App Store.

Elevate is on a mission to make the world a smarter place.