Discover + Define

We decide to first get a better understanding of the well-being market as a whole and the current status of meditation within this market. Looking into the 2021 Global Consumer survey, McKinsey, (which was down with 7500 participants) we found 79% of respondents believed wellness was important and 42% consider it a top priority. Global increase attributed to public interest and purchasing power, and how innovation was especially essential to the wellbeing market. This only iterated that we could definite make some positive iterations to the Balance app as it is. Although they’ve been rated a one of the top apps, continuous improvements would keep them above their competition.

Mindfulness currently holds a small market share within the wellness market with a strong opportunity to grow. According to the McKinsey survey, the typical consumers in the wellness market falls into

1. A high income bracket, very brand conscious, and excited by new innovations.

2. Socially responsible - prefers environmentally sustainable brands.

3. Price conscious consumer - who believes wellness is important, but compare features and benefits before making a purchase.

This clearly gave us the answer we were looking for. Our direction of pairing the Balance meditation app with a wearable devise could most probably create excitement on the innovation side of things, seeing that users would now be able to track their bioinformatics data via an EEG headband. This feature would give users the ability to increase engagement and track their progress.

Our user research hit off with a screeners survey with 26 participants. From this, we found that every single one of them have meditated at least once before and nearly 80% of participants used some kind of digital platform to support their meditation sessions.

We then moved onto user interviews. Some valuable feedback was received from our 6 participants.

“It’s the biggest struggle to keep any kind of focus whatsoever and I’ll be like’What was that noice?’”

“Did I breath in?” “…the right way?”

“I prefer the carrot to the stick”

“I suppose as soon as you measure something progress on your phone, it detracts from your mindfulness concept itself”

We created 2 personas from our research.

Meet Amy… (primary persona)

She particularly uses meditation as her go to whenever she is stressed or anxious. She meditates alone by follow guided sessions using an app on her phone. Furthermore, she’s always unsure about her progress and unable to objectively track how meditation has affected her wellness state. She wishes to meditate more, knowing she is doing it correctly, seeing her progress and the effect it has on her breathing and mind.

Meet Dave… (secondary persona)

Meditation is part of his daily routine, and he feels the effect on his wellbeing. Her prefer guiding himself through meditation and find having a mobile device with step by step prompts distracting, so avoid using it when he meditates.

We looked into our primary persona and came to the following conclusion to her problem:

Amy needs a clear way to track her meditation results so that she is motivated and interested in continuing her meditation journey.

These were some opportunities that jumped out:

• How might we remove Amy’s block or discouragement around meditation?

• How might we ensure that the progress data she accesses is beneficial and applicable to her journey

• How might we ensure that she understands how she can interpret her tracking data

Furthermore, we have done a Competitive / Comparative analysis, by doing a feature inventory and task analysis on some of their main piers, including Headspace, Noom, Calm and MyZone.

Design + Deliver

At this point, we set up a Design Studio within our team and done a Crazy 8 exercise, where we had to all individually sketch basic ideas and solutions that could make our users receive their progress in a simple way. This allowed us to explore our problems on how progress data can be presented to our users creatively and together as a team decide on the best solution which could possible make most sense to our users.

We put together a more linear user flow and started wire framing by sketching out each frame. This was followed with high fidelity prototyping so get some user tests done. After 8 in person unmoderated usability tests we faced some clear pain-points with how users expected navigation to flow, the complexity in how user’s progress data was not fully looked into by most users and how we needed to simplify how progress was presented to our users for it to make more sense. Usability tests confirmed some degree of confusion of direction, functionality and comprehension of user’s progress. We made iterations to the high fidelity to address some of these major pain points.

We continued to test and iterate our prototype to a point where we had to present to our cohort.

Conclusion

Working on this application with my team made me realise that it’s not about what you present to your users, but mostly about how you present it to them. Would all our users be able to make sense of their progress tracking and ultimately get enough from it to inspire them to more actively user the balance app on a daily basis? User Research, once again, highlighted some problematic areas disrupting the flow and gave us a clear indication to how users portrayed their progress.

Our team worked very well together, and having a project plan on Trello definitely helped us stay on track with tasks and responsibilities within our given time frame. Effective communication was key throughout. This pulled us together and inhibited trust and reliability and the ability to switch tasks and get the project done in the best possible way.