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Melooha2023 · 5 months

Melooha — AI Astrology App

We turned the world's oldest guidance system into a real-time AI product. The design raised $635K, earned a national TV feature, and launched to 4.1 stars.

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Seed Funding Raised

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India — Season 3

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App Store Rating

Consumer App DesignAI/ML ProductVisual DesignInvestor Pitch DesignTrust-led UX

Client

Melooha

Year

2023

Role

Product Designer

Duration

5 months

The Brief

01

The Story Behind It

The Situation

The astrology app market in India is saturated and low-trust. Most apps offer the same generic zodiac horoscopes — no personalization, no depth. Melooha had a genuine technical edge that was invisible in the product.

What We Did

After a discovery sprint mapping how people actually seek and trust astrology guidance, we designed 80+ screens across iOS and Android — from onboarding to the 30-second Q&A engine, the birth chart visualization, and the family profile system.

What Changed

App live on iOS and Android. $635,000 seed funding raised by the founding team using the designed prototype. Featured on Shark Tank India Season 3. 4.1 stars across 7,500+ user reviews.

CapabilitiesConsumer App DesignAI/ML ProductVisual DesignInvestor Pitch DesignTrust-led UX

What Drove It

02

Research & Design Bets

What the research showed, and the bets we made in response.

What We Found

Trust is visual — users judge credibility before reading a word

In perception tests, users formed a strong trust opinion within 8 seconds of seeing the app. Dark, premium design with clear typography scored far higher than colorful, icon-heavy alternatives — even when the content was identical. The design had to do the trust-building work before any reading was delivered.

Personalization at birth-data level feels 'accurate' — generic zodiac doesn't

Users who entered their full birth data (date, time, place) reported insights feeling far more accurate than apps using only birth year or sun sign. The onboarding friction of capturing birth details was worth it — it was the foundation of the entire value proposition.

The daily habit loop beats deep reports for retention

Users who checked a quick daily brief — lucky color, Choghadiya, mood guidance — came back at 4× the rate of users who only consumed long-form reports. The 'Today' screen wasn't just a feature: it was the engine that made everything else sticky.

The Bets We Made

Deep space aesthetic — cosmic premium over playful

Situation

The astrology app category is split between saffron-heavy traditional apps and candy-bright western ones. Neither communicated the premium, data-driven positioning Melooha needed.

The Bet

A deep space visual system — near-black backgrounds with subtle nebula gradients, hot-pink precision accents, and high-contrast typography. No illustrations, no star-sign icons.

The Payoff

Users rated the design 'professional', 'trustworthy', and 'different from every app I've used' in the first 10 seconds — before reading any content.

Progressive disclosure on the birth chart

Situation

The Kundli birth chart is astrology's most powerful artifact — and its most visually intimidating. A full chart overwhelms every user except dedicated practitioners.

The Bet

A two-layer approach: a clean summary card showing the most meaningful elements as the default view, with a 'View Full Chart' tap leading to the complete, interactive Kundli.

The Payoff

New users understood their chart within 2 minutes. Power users still had access to full precision. Onboarding completion improved significantly.

Q&A as a conversation, not a search — the 30-second wait as anticipation

Situation

Early concepts treated the Q&A engine as a search bar. User testing revealed this felt cheap and clinical — at odds with the intimate nature of consulting an astrologer.

The Bet

A full-screen conversational interface with a visible AI calculation state — animated planetary positions — making the 30-second wait feel like expertise being applied, not lag.

The Payoff

The Ask feature became the most-used flow in user testing. Users cited the processing state as evidence that 'something real is happening' — trust in the answer increased with the wait.

The Structure

03

Architecture & Core Primitives

Architecture defined before a single screen was drawn — structure shapes behaviour.

Information Architecture

Core Primitives

The Work

04

Screens That Shaped the Product

Every screen below was driven by a research insight — here's the decision chain from problem to pixel.

Screen 1

Screen 01 / 04

Today's Cosmic Brief

Daily brief users returned at 4× the rate of non-daily-brief users — but the product had no dedicated daily ritual surface.

The Design Decision

A fully personalized daily card — lucky color, Choghadiya, Rahu Kaal, and a planetary snapshot — calculated in real time from birth data, not zodiac sign.

Daily brief users returned at 4× the rate of non-daily-brief users in closed beta.

Screen 2

Screen 02 / 04

Real-Time Q&A Engine

The Q&A engine was the product's technical differentiator — but early designs made it feel like search, which eroded the mystical credibility users expected.

The Design Decision

A full-screen conversational interface with visible AI calculation state — animated planetary positions — making the 30-second wait feel like expertise being applied.

Users who used Ask in the first session had 3× higher Day-7 retention.

Screen 3

Screen 03 / 04

Kundli — Birth Chart Made Readable

The full birth chart overwhelmed new users while power users expected full precision — a tension most apps resolved by oversimplifying and losing the experts.

The Design Decision

Progressive disclosure: a clean summary card showing the most meaningful elements by default, with a tap-through to the full, interactive Kundli.

New users understood their chart in under 2 minutes. Power users praised the depth. Both audiences satisfied.

Screen 4

Screen 04 / 04

Family Vault

Many users' primary motivation was checking their children's, parents', or partner's Kundli — not just their own. The app had no native way to do this.

The Design Decision

Multi-profile family system with a one-tap profile switcher in the global header — add members, share questions, manage privacy, switch profiles without losing your place.

Family sharing became the most-requested feature in testing and the most natural referral mechanism in the product.

The Outcome

Results That Proved the Thesis

01 / 04

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Seed Funding

Raised post-prototype from Streak Ventures LLC and angel investors

02 / 04

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National Exposure

Featured on Season 3, Episode 47 — national prime-time audience

03 / 04

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App Rating

Across 7,500+ reviews on iOS and Android

04 / 04

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Market Position

Entered India's astrology market as one of its most technically advanced players

We had the technology — the algorithm, the data pipeline, the AI engine. What we didn't have was an experience that made someone believe in it the moment they opened the app. Bluemint solved that. The design they created wasn't just beautiful — it communicated credibility before a single reading was delivered. When we walked into investor meetings with that prototype, the product spoke for itself. The funding followed.

Vikram Labhe

CEO & Founder, Melooha

Before We Go

06

What This Project Taught Us

Key Learnings

  • Trust is the hardest thing to design in a spiritual product — it lives in the space between pixels, not in any single feature. Every design decision we made was ultimately a trust decision.

  • Designing for emotionally sensitive domains (faith, health, relationships) requires understanding the user's mental model before touching a single screen. What feels like a UI problem is almost always a belief problem underneath.

  • The prototype is the pitch. When you're building for a pre-seed company, the design isn't just the product — it's the fundraising instrument. Every flow needs to communicate ambition and execution simultaneously.

Let’s Collaborate

Designing a product in a trust-sensitive category?

We make the design do the trust work — in the first 10 seconds, before a single feature is demonstrated. Melooha raised $635K before a line of code was shipped.

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