Hanuman App
A mobile experience for daily practice that doesn't feel 'techy.'
ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) needed a mobile experience that helps devotees stay connected to daily practices — chanting, scripture reading, festival observance — without feeling disconnected from tradition. The product itself was sacred: every design decision had to honor a long tradition while still being genuinely usable for a younger, phone-first generation.
Four groups needed to be served by one app: daily practitioners, new seekers exploring the tradition, NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) wanting to stay connected from abroad, and temple administrators coordinating across a large network of temples.
Practice lived on paper and scattered calendars. Younger devotees were drifting away.
Chanting was tracked on paper, if at all — easy to lose, no sense of progress. Festival calendars were scattered across individual temples with no single source of truth. Scripture reading had no continuity: people started but rarely finished. And younger devotees, raised on phones rather than books, were disengaging from daily practice.
This wasn't a typical consumer app brief. It was a generational bridge — helping an older generation pass practice on to a phone-native one, without the app itself feeling like the thing competing for their attention.
Four core features, each solving one piece of the continuity problem.
Visual decisions made in consultation with priests, not just designers.
Consulting priests early, and treating a streak as encouragement, not a game.
Having priests review and bless features early, before build, kept the product honest to the tradition it served — this mattered more than any single UI decision. The streak mechanic on the Chant Tracker turned out to be a simple, effective nudge for a genuinely daily ritual, and the temple locator became a meaningfully useful feature for devotees living far from a physical temple.
Three things I'd sequence differently with hindsight.
I'd prioritize an early AR-based prasad (offering) feature for younger users rather than treating it as a later add-on — it tested well informally with the 18–25 focus group. I'd lean on WhatsApp-native sharing from day one rather than in-app-only sharing, since that's how this community actually spreads recommendations. And I'd launch with more temples represented from day one, since local relevance was clearly what drove adoption inside the focus groups.
Designing for a sacred experience means removing your own ego from it.
The app shipped with all four core features live. The lasting lesson from this project wasn't a UI pattern — it was learning to design for something bigger than the product itself. The best design decisions were the ones that stayed invisible: the app never tried to feel clever. It tried to feel like a companion to a practice that already mattered to the people using it.
The best design was invisible — it never felt like an app.