AVIKA | 2025
Pause Portal
A calm space that gives people a glimpse of what knowing themselves better feels like. My idea, my design, built and shipped on my own.
TEAM
Me, end to end (design, build, ship)
Activity content by Avika's psychologists
MY ROLE
Conceptualization
Design
UX Copy
Prototyping
Build (Lovable)
DURATION
1 week
Where it started
The idea came from a question I kept asking myself. Avika does a lot of its work at events and workshops, and I wanted to know what we were actually leaving people with when they walked away. My answer was that I wanted to give them something they could feel in just a few minutes: a small glimpse of what it is like to understand yourself a little better, the thing self-awareness actually feels like when you experience it instead of hearing about it. At an event, that glimpse also becomes a way in. Someone tries an activity, something lands, and that becomes the start of a conversation with one of our experts.
That idea became Pause Portal.
What it is
Pause Portal is a collection of short, interactive activities, each one designed by a psychologist and built as its own tile. You can open any single activity on its own and finish it in a few minutes, so there is no long flow to get through before the actual experience begins. The activities are grouped into themed categories, and each category covers a different part of everyday life:
You at Work — managing workplace stress, noticing automatic thinking, and building emotional agility on the job. Activities like Reframe, React or Respond, and Stress Style Quiz.
You at Home — relationships, family dynamics, and who you are outside of work. Activities like Parenting Style Quiz, Unsent Message, and My Confessions.
You & Sleep — understanding and improving how you sleep. Activities like Sleep Score, Sleep Myths & Facts, and Design Your Wind-Down.
General — quick, grounding resets for any moment. Activities like Just Breathe, Soundscape, and Color Me.
For people in a closer, ongoing setting, signed-in users also get a personalized journey that guides them through activities suited to them over time.
The catch
Here is where it got interesting. Avika does not run one kind of event. One week it is a college full of students, the next it is a corporate floor, then a casual workshop at a cafe, then an open session for the general public. An activity that speaks to a stressed engineer can feel completely off for a room of eighteen year olds.
And I would not be in any of those rooms. The person running each session, a founder or one of the therapists, would be the one reading the room in real time. I had no way of knowing in advance what each of those rooms would need. That was the actual problem I had to solve: how do you design one experience for rooms you will never be standing in?
The decision
My answer was to stop trying to design one perfect version. Instead, I made the portal configurable, so the person running the session could build the right experience for the room in front of them. They choose which categories appear, which activities sit inside each one, and how the whole thing is framed for that specific audience. A student event and a corporate workshop can run on the exact same portal and feel like two completely different experiences.
The participant never sees any of this. On their side it stays calm and simple. All the setup sits with the person who actually knows the room.
The sign-in question
There was one more decision to make, around sign-in. In individual sessions, where someone is working with Avika more closely, it helps to save their progress and shape what they see over time. At a walk-up booth, asking a stranger to create an account would get in the way of the whole idea.
So I turned sign-in into a setting the host controls. When it is on, usually for individual sessions, people get their own space called My Space and a journey that adapts to them. When it is off, usually for events, the portal opens straight to the activities grid with nothing in the way.
I built the whole thing myself
I designed and built Pause Portal on my own using Lovable, with no engineering team and no handoff. The concept, the structure, and the working product all came from me. The configurable setup was a deliberate choice too: I wanted the Avika team to be able to run the portal their own way in any setting, without waiting on anyone to touch the code each time.
Where it is now
Pause Portal is live, and Avika's team uses it in the field today across the events and sessions it was made for.
Still here? Let's make something ↓
What I'm looking for
(go on - tick all three)
hard problems with no rule-book
a team that sweats the craft
room to own the whole problem
P.S find me here ↓
samasaishreya@gmail.com
linkedin.com/in/shreya-sama/
