NERON · Matthew Nazarian

10+
Organizations onboarded to paid pilots: 1 → 10+
Clients scaled without adding headcount: 0
Sales calls required for a new user to convert

Overview

NERON is a brain performance platform built on cognitive-motor integration research. It measures brain performance through movement and turns each result into a personal Brain Dynamics Signature. I joined as the sole product designer with a mandate to move the platform from an early prototype to a product that could sell itself.

The project ran to a four-month scope, and across it I owned user experience, product strategy, the growth funnel, developer documentation, and the client rollout system, working alongside ten internal team members and a five-person offshore development team. Every deliverable described in this case study shipped to production inside those four months.

The problem

NERON could not grow without hiring. Every single conversion required an employee to be physically in the room, walking the prospect through the product. The sales-led model was expensive, slow, and impossible to scale, and it meant the company's growth ceiling was its headcount.

The product itself made a self-serve alternative feel out of reach. The prototype carried functional bugs and user experience gaps, and an architectural constraint was blocking deployment to more than one organization at a time. There was no path from the website into the app, and there was no repeatable way to onboard an enterprise client.

I started by running the full assessment flow myself and producing a severity-rated, screen-by-screen audit. I presented the findings and a prioritized redesign roadmap to the CEO and CTO, and that roadmap set the direction for the entire project.

The Brain Dynamics Signature screen before the redesign, with four assessment-type toggles, 2D and 3D mode switches, and separate Agility and Adaptivity bar charts — The product as I inherited it. The Signature screen asked a first-time user to choose between four assessment types and reconcile two bar charts before anything meant anything, and the organization dashboard reported brain performance as a game: high score, max level, level per session.

The organization dashboard before the redesign, reporting High Score, Max Level, and a per-session Overall Score and Level — The product as I inherited it. The Signature screen asked a first-time user to choose between four assessment types and reconcile two bar charts before anything meant anything, and the organization dashboard reported brain performance as a game: high score, max level, level per session.

Marked-up score screen from the audit, with regions blocked out in red for the Agility and Adaptivity charts and the current session score — Two pages of the audit. I marked up live screens rather than writing about them: what each region was actually claiming, what it should hold instead, and which numbers belonged in the same group.

Marked-up session list from the audit, grouping sessions into cognitive reserve and cognitive performance with a full-to-empty battery sketch — Two pages of the audit. I marked up live screens rather than writing about them: what each region was actually claiming, what it should hold instead, and which numbers belonged in the same group.

The insight

Before designing anything, I benchmarked more than eight competing products, including Creyos, Oura, WHOOP, Lumosity, Elevate, and BrainHQ, and organized the findings into structured comparison tables.

One finding mattered more than all the others. Nothing in the market resembled the Brain Dynamics Signature. Every competitor offered scores, streaks, or rings. None of them could show a person a three-dimensional picture of how their brain controls their movement.

That changed the problem. New users did not need to be sold. They needed to be walked to the one moment no competitor could offer.

The bet

I anchored the entire growth model on a single screen and designed backwards from it. If a first-time visitor could reach their own Brain Dynamics Signature quickly enough, the product would do the convincing that a salesperson used to do.

The path runs from a website call to action, through zero-friction trial account creation, into a conversational onboarding, through the first in-app assessment, and finally to the Signature reveal and a Stripe-integrated upgrade. The web flows adapt to authentication state, so a new visitor, a trial user, and a returning member each see the right next step. The CEO approved the model at the company all-hands, and it became the foundation for every paid pilot that followed.

Full sports-performance vertical landing page, from hero through Brain Signature explainer to the early-access form — The funnel begins on the website. This is the sports performance vertical, one of six audience-specific entry points that all feed the same path to the Signature.

Designing the moment

The Signature screen had to work for two audiences at once. A DRDC neuroscientist and a seventy-five-year-old resident of a memory care facility would look at the same screen on the same day, and it had to be credible to the first without being opaque to the second.

The platform produces three metrics: the Brain Score, Agility, and Adaptivity. The obvious layout gives all three equal weight, and it is the layout I rejected. A first-time user who sees three unfamiliar numbers at once remembers none of them. I restructured the hierarchy so the Brain Score reads as the single dominant metric, with Agility and Adaptivity in a compact secondary row, because the conversion moment depends on one number a person can carry out of the room in their head.

The CEO pushed back, wanting considerably more explanatory text on the screen, and it took several rounds of showing rather than arguing to make the case that less text and clearer visual cues carry the moment better.

I specified the comparison toggle, the population norm ranges, and the zone colour mapping, and the clinical copy was reviewed by the company's PhD-level science lead.

The Signature screen before the redesign, with the trajectory competing against five stacked zone bands and Agility and Adaptivity bar charts given equal weight — Before: the trajectory competes with five stacked zone bands, Agility and Adaptivity carry equal weight as bar charts, and there is no single number to leave the room with.

NERON Brain Dynamics Signature screen with 3D movement trajectory and population comparison — After: the production Brain Dynamics Signature. The movement trajectory leads, the Brain Score dominates, and Agility and Adaptivity sit in a supporting row against population norms.

The two-audience tension resolved through progressive depth rather than compromise. Practitioners get a how-to-read legend with clinical detail on demand. Everyone else gets a plain-language summary one tap away. Neither audience pays for the other's needs.

How to read your Brain Signature legend panel — Clinical depth on demand: the how-to-read legend built for practitioners, and the same screen one tap later, a plain-language summary for everyone else.

Plain-language summary popover explaining what the Signature means — Clinical depth on demand: the how-to-read legend built for practitioners, and the same screen one tap later, a plain-language summary for everyone else.

The path to the moment

A great destination screen is worthless if new users never reach it, so the rest of the app design served one goal: get a stranger from account creation to their Signature without losing them.

The plan of record for onboarding was a chain of twenty-four tooltips and spotlights layered over the interface. Instead of executing that plan, I made the case to replace it. Tooltip tutorials teach the interface, but they collect nothing and they delay the assessment. I designed an eleven-screen conversational wizard that does three jobs at once: it collects the practitioner profile data the platform needs, it teaches the neuroscience framework in plain language, and it sets expectations for the first assessment. It asks one thing at a time, which keeps cognitive load low for the oldest users in the audience.

NERON wizard welcome screen — The wizard opens as a conversation, starting from what the platform already knows; teaching screens explain what the platform measures before the user ever runs a task.

NERON wizard screen explaining how the platform measures brain-motor control — The wizard opens as a conversation, starting from what the platform already knows; teaching screens explain what the platform measures before the user ever runs a task.

Final NERON wizard screen leading into the first assessment — The final screen hands off to the first assessment, with profile complete and expectations set.

After the first assessment, a guided first-look sequence carries the user from their score, through the three-dimensional Signature reveal, to the upgrade prompt, one card at a time.

The copy in that sequence is not static. A struggling seventy-year-old and a high-performing athlete cannot read the same message at the same moment, so every metric carries five tiers of zone-specific copy. Each user reads a message written for their result, and each version leads naturally toward the upgrade.

First-look walkthrough card explaining the Brain Dynamics Score — The first-look sequence begins the moment the first result lands, then hands off from the score to the Signature reveal.

First-look walkthrough card handing off to the Brain Signature — The first-look sequence begins the moment the first result lands, then hands off from the score to the Signature reveal.

Matrix of zone-specific copy across Brain Score, Agility, and Adaptivity — The zone copy system: three metrics, five performance tiers, every user reads copy written for their result.

Upgrade prompt inviting the user to add members to their organization — The sequence ends at the conversion moment.

The training experience carries the same dual-audience logic as the Signature. I designed two coexisting modes, a clinical practitioner-facing display and an engagement-focused consumer experience, that share the same screens and switch icons and copy through conditional logic. I specified the behavior across six screens so the development team could build both modes from a single source of truth.

NERON Connect training session screen — A training session as the consumer-facing mode presents it.

How I worked

The onboarding screens went through two tools, deliberately. Early concepts started in Claude Design, where I wrote detailed prompts describing the interaction model, tone, and content I was after, and reacted to working concepts rather than blank canvases. Articulating what I wanted precisely enough for the AI to build it was a design exercise in itself. Every round of prompting forced me to sharpen my own thinking before any pixel-level work began. Once a direction held up, I moved into Figma to dial in the final screens: the brand's type and colour system, real layout grids, and every state the development team would need.

Early Claude Design exploration board with welcome-tutorial modals and spotlight tutorial concepts — An early exploration board from Claude Design, including the spotlight-tutorial direction that was eventually dropped.

The development team worked offshore and across time zones, so my specifications had to remove any need for interpretation. Every major initiative went to the team as a handoff document with complete data mapping, conditional logic for every state, and integration guidance, and the offshore team implemented each one without design questions coming back.

Annotated build screenshot reserving the right-hand panel for the assessment report, with a sketch of the cognitive reserve scale — The same habit ran through the build. Marking intent directly onto the running app, in place and in context, meant the offshore team never had to reconcile a document against a screen.

Annotated build screenshot noting that the right-hand panel will hold content specific to each protocol — The same habit ran through the build. Marking intent directly onto the running app, in place and in context, meant the offshore team never had to reconcile a document against a screen.

The rest of the machine

The funnel needed infrastructure around it, and as the only designer I built all of it. Six vertical-market landing pages for distinct audiences, each with its own palette and editorial voice. Five product-led growth web pages and three email templates forming the bridge from the website to the first assessment. A five-document enterprise deployment suite, staff training materials, and family-facing communications that let clients run their own rollouts, with NERON physically present only once, at kickoff. Terminology governance across every touchpoint, audited against the company's canonical brand language.

That deployment system is what turned one pilot client into more than ten without a single new hire, and it was proven first at a memory care provider, then extended to a national defence research agency and multiple partner organizations in the aging space.

NERON organization dashboard listing individuals and their assessments — The organization view enterprise clients run their programs from: every individual, every assessment, exportable.

Outcome

Within the project's four-month scope, the platform went from a prototype to a production product onboarding paying early-access customers. Between ten and twelve organizations came onto paid pilots through the new self-serve system, including Defence Research and Development Canada, and the company scaled from one client to more than ten without adding headcount.

What I would measure next

The four-month scope closed before the funnel had instrumentation mature enough to isolate design impact, and I would rather name that gap than paper over it. Three numbers would tell me whether the design is doing its job.

Wizard completion rate would validate the decision to replace the tooltip tutorial, and I would want it above ninety percent given how much friction the conversational format removes. Time from account creation to first completed assessment would measure the funnel's core promise, because every hour of delay before the Signature reveal is a chance to lose the user before the product's best argument. Trial-to-paid conversion, segmented by the five performance tiers, would test my strongest assumption: that zone-specific copy converts struggling users and high performers at comparable rates. If the tiers diverge sharply, the copy system needs another pass.

Reflection

The through-line of this project was concentration. The product's most distinctive idea was the Brain Dynamics Signature, and the highest-leverage move was to point everything at it: the funnel, the onboarding, the copy system, and the web presence all exist to carry a new user to that one moment.

If I ran this project again, I would fight for instrumentation in week one rather than treating it as a post-launch concern. I designed a measurable system and shipped it before there was anything in place to measure it with, and the difference between believing a design works and knowing it works is the difference I care most about closing.