Interra — Anticipating sensory overload before your body does
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
March 2026
Team
3 Product Designers
Platform
Mobile Application
THE IDEA
What if your phone could sense an overwhelming environment before your body does?
Interra explores how wearable biometrics and environmental signals could make otherwise invisible sensory triggers easier to recognize and act on.
THE PROBLEM
People often manage sensory overload reactively, rather than proactively.
We began by looking at how college students experience sensory overload in their everyday environments and what they currently do when it happens.
THE RESEARCH
We surveyed 18 college students about their experiences with sensory overload.
out of 18
were interested in technology that could map hidden sensory triggers.
Core Insight
Participants often recognized sensory overload after it had already started affecting them.
THE OPPORTUNITY
People often manage sensory overload reactively, rather than proactively.
This shifted our focus toward anticipation: identifying subtle changes in the user's body and environment and surfacing them before the user has to recognize those patterns on their own.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
We translated our research into three principles for the experience:
1
Privacy-first onboarding experience
Interra introduces how biometric and environmental data contribute to the experience before asking users to connect their information and build a personal sensory profile.
2
Proactive intervention
When Interra detects changes associated with sensory stress, a gentle notification gives users immediate access to support without requiring them to navigate through the app.
3
Environment-aware discovery
Users can explore nearby spaces based on environmental factors like noise and crowd levels, helping them find a setting that better matches their current sensory needs.
REFLECTION
When users are overwhelmed, design choices should reduce the number of decisions they need to make.
Moving forward, I want to approach every project with this same level of consideration for cognitive load, to ensure that I'm designing visually-pleasing and straightforward experiences that improve people's lives, without needing to think twice about it.