UX/UI Case Study: Mindfulness Habit

Challenge: To design an innovative online platform that targets National Wellness Institute’s users and encourages them to commit to a healthier lifestyle. The challenge allowed for creative freedom to decide which area of wellness to tackle (within the defined six dimensions of wellness listed by NWI: emotional, occupational, physical, spiritual, intellectual, and social).

Ideally, I wanted to be able to design a platform that would help users tackle more than one dimension, and that is why I chose to target into meditation. Meditation has been correlated to have a positive impact on emotional, physical, spiritual, and intellectual well-being.

Tools: Sketch, Invision, Flinto

“Meditation” is hard to define, because the word can apply to so many things. In the broadest sense, it is any method used to train the mind or to achieve a special state of consciousness. — Lizzie Widdicombe

Problem:

National Wellness Institute (NWI) has seen a dwindling amount of members in recent years and although they offer some free online content on wellness their current platform is outdated.

User centered research:

In order to understand what areas of opportunities existed to target meditators in this new platform, a two-step approach was taken: First, a survey was performed to understand patterns associated with people that meditate. Second, an extensive feature analysis was performed to understand the minimum baseline requirements that meditators expect from a meditation application.

From the survey done on 117 people, I learned that at least 60% of people mediate. This percentage of people that meditate do so primarily to get positive feelings and to increase their focus. The survey had a well-rounded representation of people (balanced for female:male ratio and age demographics).

Also learned from the survey is that the majority of people that meditated have at some point downloaded a meditation application. Furthermore, I learned that the majority of meditators do not use a smart watch or other smart fitness device to help them track their meditation progress. Most importantly, it was learned from their habit responses that the majority of meditators DO NOT practice mediation by breathing exercises alone. These insights were helpful for me to draft my interview questions in line to better understand the habits of these meditators.

I also performed 6 interviews (3 male, 3 female) from meditation practitioners that had different levels of meditation experience. From the interviews I was able to aggregate the habits of both beginner and experienced practitioners ( ‘beginner practitioner’ was defined as one that has been meditating for less than one year and ‘experienced’ any one that has been meditating for a longer period of time than that). I attended advanced yoga classes limited to instructors in order to make sure that I was able to find my target audience for the interviews.

In addition to the surveys and interviews performed, I also researched the competitors in the space. From an initial research, I found that there are over 200 apps in the Play Store for Android apps associated with the word “meditation” and over 200 apps in Apple Store for iOS. I chose to focus on the top 5 applications to see what were the similarities and differences in each. To better understand how the users of these apps felt about the features I did secondary research on the store reviews for both the Play Store and the Apple Store.

Hypothesis:

Considering the number of competitors that currently existed in the market place, I believed that NWI would benefit most from focusing their attention initially on seasoned/experienced meditators that were not as commonly targeted in applications as beginner practitioners were. My initial hypothesis was that the NWI’s subscribed community would increase if the seasoned meditation practitioner’s experience in the online platform allowed them to increase their positive feelings as a direct result of increasing their meditation time.

Although my initial hypothesis was to focus on seasoned meditation practitioners, I wanted to be able to better understand how both types of meditators developed their habits to meditate. I performed an empathy map for both the primary candidate (seasoned practitioners) and secondary candidate (beginner practitioners). Which led me to create a user persona for each, making sure I understood what were their goals in meditation, and what were their motivations and frustrations. I figured the more comprehensive the research, the better insight into finding opportunities for making a meditation application that was going to be able to satisfy both candidates.

Ideating:

Leveraging the previous affinity diagram, I added the insights from the empathy maps and user journey to brainstorm solutions that were going to be somewhat unique to have a differentiator from other competitors, but more importantly focused on brainstorming a solution that would help experienced meditators reach a new level in their practice.

MVP:

Used the MOSCOW method to help me narrow the solution options to those that were going to have the largest impact on the experienced user and that were not going to require that much development.

The minimum viable product needed to both incorporate the minimum baseline requirements previously noted and the differentiating feature for the seasoned meditators. I chose to focus on the following features:

Must have:

Visual and sound displays as a timer ( to elongate the meditation engagement)

Emojis to demonstrate feelings (so that users can make correlations)

Timer progressive metrics (part of baseline)

Integration of Health Application (so that NWI development for each fitness device would not be necessary as the responsibility for development of those connections and NWI would only be responsible for leveraging an API to the data on the Health application)

Would be nice to have:

Partnerships with influencer seminars (so that premium users can feel like they are getting more value for their membership fees by receiving discounts)

Chat portal with a personal concierge that is also an experienced practitioner (to have customized recommendations for the user)

Low-fi wireframes:

For the initial wireframe of the MVP, I created a user flow for both the on-boarding and ideal path to follow for the MVP features.

From the 5 observations performed to test the MVP concept and usability of the low fi wireframe, I noted that the on-boarding was simple and intuitive as 100% of users were able to navigate questions within 30 seconds. Also 4/5 users said that they liked both the questions for the customization and the incorporation of visuals during the meditation. Only 1 out of 5 users said that they would not use the application because they does not like to have technology devices nearby.

The additional 5 usability testers for the mid-fidelity prototype gave consistent feedback to the low-fi design, as such the improvements were primarily limited to simplifying the home screen and simplifying the icons in the meditation screen, as well as navigating to the meditation history to have the user make correlations based on his/her progress.

UI Design process:

Since visuals and sounds are a key component of the MVP, selecting the right colors and atomic elements for the application was key.

I started by considering the psychology of colors and used the color wheel to find colors that represented transformation, spirituality, and serenity. Adjectives that I thought would resonate with experienced meditators as gathered from the original research.

I also took the time to download each of the competitor applications listed previously to see how their interfaces were designed. Partially as inspiration, partially to make sure that there were clear distinctions between Mindfulness Habit and the competitors.

I created a moodboard inspired by the natural colors of the universe. I presented the moodboard to five experienced meditators to understand what feelings the images ignited, and received responses like “quiet elegance”, “still water runs deep”, “ calm before the storm”, “introspective”, and “beautiful chaos”. All of which were line with the desirability adjectives of: spirituality, deep, and abstract.

I leveraged the moodboard to create a style tile in the hope that it would deliver a similar message. However after presenting the left version of the tile to 5 people I found that the logo, font, and button designs were not consistent with the message. In the original tile that appears on the left, the logo font was too small to read and the white background of the logo was in sharp contrast to the burgundy background in such a way that it did not flow. The negative feedback was also around the design of the buttons; there was not enough of a contrast between the filling of the buttons and the background color, which made the buttons hard to see.

From the feedback received, I redesigned the style tile so that the background color was more closely in line with the primary image that conveyed spirituality. I also selected to have sharp contrast in color selections for the filled buttons, and to simplify the design of the logo so it would be easier to display on a phone screen while keeping the gradient feel of the original design.

While initially testing the hi-fidelity prototype with experienced meditators found that the majority of the testers thought that the colors in the application were too feminine (as they were primarily in the spectrum of pink). From that feedback received, I designed the same flow of screens after on-boarding but with the primary spectrum of blue as a focus and presented the option of customization to the user as they finished on-boarding. Ideally though, the customization of colors would be driven by the initial on-boarding selection combinations made.

Takeaways and next steps:

Overall, the feedback I received through the various rounds of testing was primarily positive for the MVP idea of incorporating visuals and sounds to allow the meditator to get into a deeper state of concentration in their practice. However, given the criticality of presentation and content as it relates to the mental model, I think it would be best to test various hi fidelity prototypes with the specified target audience to make sure to address the expectation of customized content based on the initial on-boarding selections.

Ideally, the dashboard content will also be modified to include metrics that will allow the meditators to monitor their own progress, and become aware of their growth. Metrics in the dashboard should include frequency of meditation, length of meditation, correlation between meditation efforts and elevated heartbeats, and correlation between meditation efforts and how they felt that week (based on the emoji selections made).

NWI should be able to determine if the initial hypothesis is correct by monitoring session length, session intervals, retention rates, and application ratings in Apple and Play stores.