TL;DR: AI dramatically streamlines user discovery, enabling real-time market validation. AI excels at persona creation and defining market and user needs. AI’s rapid feedback loop significantly cuts down traditional weeks-long user research into real-time iterations, enabling you to refine your core app user hypothesis value proposition quickly and effectively.
Tips:
- Start broadly using open-ended questions, and let AI confirm or challenge your initial assumptions.
- For this step, start with Gemini Deep and other AI tools that identify the information sources to avoid accidental plagiarism and to gain clarity through additional research insights.
Traditional user discovery often requires lengthy research periods asking questions around: What is the key persona for this product? What challenges is the users facing around this job/task? What features would bring the user joy? Using AI, however, I was able to submit these types of broad questions directly to Gemini Deep to rapidly obtain insights and confirm hypotheses.
The Resonant Way breathing app was inspired by the breath-focused meditation and yoga championed by Yoga with Adriene and her Find What Feels Good (FWFG) community. One of the books she recommended was The Breathing Book: Good Health and Vitality Through Essential Breath Work by Donna Farhi. I found the breathing techniques in the book changed my body in a profoundly positive way, and I committed to a regular breathing practice as my 2025 New Year’s goal. Around the same time, FWFG began posting a series of soundbath videos by Nani Clem. Listening to Nani’s soundbaths while I practiced my breathing helped me enter a state of flow more quickly and sustain the session for longer in a deeper state of calm. I formed a hypothesis that by promoting breath and sound together, people could attain a more relaxed and calm and thoughtful physical and mental state.
Unfortunately, most freely available breath timing apps lacked customizable features like selection of audio, visuals, and haptic feedback intensity to help support my ideal breathing practice. Overall, they felt bare-bones and weren’t fun to use. I identified a market need for a customizable free breathing app.
I decided to validate my hypothesis that a breathing tool could help others, by feeding the hypothesis into Gemini Deep using an intentionally obtuse query, "What features would a software app need to encourage users to vibrate positively like meditation bowls?" Within a matter of minutes Gemini Deep validated my theory by pointing to cited scientific studies that combining breathing exercises with sound significantly improves relaxation. It even gave the app a name: Simulating the Sanctuary: Feature Design for a Mobile Application Replicating Meditation Bowl Effects. It incorporated breathing techniques as a key feature for the application even though my initial chat query didn’t mention breath exercises–it validated without prompting the complimentary power of the sound and breath combination. It also listed additional specific features such as haptic feedback, session timers, and progress tracking as potentially useful features to include. It emphasized the importance of a simple and uncluttered design.
Most significantly, Gemini Deep identified the harmonic complexity of meditation bowls and determined that it is impossible to fully replicate the in-person experience in a virtual environment. It presented a list of potential ways to approximate those live sounds, the top being to create high-definition recordings of meditation bowls. In other words, the breathing app would be the container, but the unique value proposition, would be to create a series of high-definition sound bath recordings to accompany the breathing app. We’ll come back to this idea at the very end of this blog series.
It’s impossible to overstate how quickly all this research was conducted. Within a matter of hours, I had a validated app and list of features. It was time to start getting visual.