7Mind's library had grown for years, with new meditations and courses added every month. The signs were subtle at first: a support ticket, a review mentioning someone had given up looking for something. But as the library scaled, it became clear these weren't isolated complaints — the structure hadn't been built for the library it now had to hold.

Note: figures rounded and absolute values omitted to protect confidential data.

Rather than optimizing the existing structure, the opportunity was to redefine the organizing principle behind the library.

By flipping each problem around, these became the concrete goals I carried through every step of the process:

To pressure-test these goals, I conducted further research and interviews, this time with people who'd never used 7Mind as well as seasoned users, then ran a prioritization workshop with product and engineering to weigh what surfaced against technical and business constraints.

This confirmed that fixing discoverability, not adding features or content, was both the highest priority need and the most technically feasible move. Interviews had already shown users felt overwhelmed by the library's size with no visible structure, and the workshop validated that restructuring navigation, rather than personalisation or content expansion, was where effort and impact aligned.

Before moving into wireframes, I checked the proposed taxonomy with the product and content teams — the people who'd need to maintain and grow it — to confirm the new topic groupings held up operationally, not just conceptually. I also brought the structure to a handful of users to see whether the topics matched how they'd naturally look for something, running alongside early wireframe exploration.

The next phase focused on translating structural decisions into product experiences that improved clarity, speed, and discoverability across Home, Library, and Search.

I left 7Mind before this went into build, so this case study presents the concept as I left it, not a shipped result. The app has since been redesigned and rebranded, and from what's visible today it follows a similar direction, organized around intent-based topics rather than a flat list. I can't say how directly this work shaped that, but it's a good sign the thinking held up.

Upon launching these improvements, I would assess if the desired impact landed by measuring the following five signals:

Validating with the product and content teams, not just users, mattered more than I expected for IA work specifically — they're the ones who live inside the taxonomy day to day, and a structure that's intuitive for users but painful to maintain operationally doesn't actually solve the scaling problem.

I also came away realizing that a use case can be underserved and still show up loudly: "quick relief" kept surfacing in interviews precisely because the old IA gave it no path of its own, it just borrowed the same effort as browsing. That reframed how I'd prioritize a use case going forward — a recurring complaint is itself a structural signal, since the lack of a dedicated path can suppress the usage data you'd otherwise wait for.

Beyond the specific fixes, what kept me engaged was how many disciplines this pulled together at once: content strategy, information architecture, and behavioral research all had to move together, not sequentially. A meditation library isn't a typical content catalog either — the same session can serve completely different intents depending on someone's state of mind, so there's no single "correct" structure, only a better balance between clarity and flexibility. That tension is exactly the kind of design problem I find myself drawn to.