Problem
During the coronavirus pandemic, more people than ever before turned their attention to mindfulness apps. One of the gaps in existing solutions was that many offered audio-only experiences. For something as personal as mindfulness, a lack of visual cues—facial expressions, body posture—hindered the user’s ability to both form a connection with their instructor and also mimic their form.
My project at RoundGlass was to design a new meditation app with a specific focus on delivering studio-grade, high quality meditation content while building connections between users and instructors.
Due to NDA, I am not able to share all steps of this project.
Research
One of my first responsibilities was to interview our target demographic and create personas. This persona research helped us determine which aspects of mindfulness apps retained users—such as likable instructors. Some users reported that they used whole apps simply because they resonated with an instructor who was exclusive to the platform.
We also spoke to users interested in fitness and nutrition, because we were interested in expanding into these categories one day. One of the things that we learned, particularly with regards to fitness, was how helpful video content was for users to form a connection with their instructor. Some users reported using YouTube for meditation over Headspace for this reason—the ability to see the instructors’ face and emotions.
Users also came to meditation apps to solve a specific problem, such as to provide relief for stress and anxiety, or to help encourage sleep.
An example of how I organized notes and findings on a particular topic for the mindfulness persona using Mural. Each note is colored differently to represent a different interviewee. View Liam’s complete worksheet
High level overviews of Liam and Kylie, our mindfulness oriented personas. Liam is meditation specific whereas Kylie has a broad interest in all areas of the wellness categories. There are more personas targeting other potential verticals in the research summary deck.
FTE and Building a Connection
Even though the user will spend much of their time meditating with their eyes closed, being able to open them and see their instructor and their body language helps build an emotional connection. We are meant to interact with the entirety of a person—not just one element of them, such as their voice.
For this reason, we invested in high-quality, studio-grade content for our instructors, and utilized this not only in the content itself, but also on the instructor’s profile pages to provide an introduction to them.
The overarching user journey for our MVP was pretty straightforward.
As part of onboarding, we would ask the user to indicate what topic was most important to them, and we would recommend them content to engage with. We tracked which teachers and topics they liked and would make content recommendations to the users based on this.
Visual Design
After I assumed the role of lead in November 2020, I made it a priority to address many of the interactions and visual inconsistencies that our users had encountered and was negatively impacting retention. Many of those issues are outlined below:
The home screen in particular utilized several different types of interactions to browse and engage with content. Some had explicit CTAs, others you had to swipe left and right to view more, and the articles section was an infinite scroll. I felt this complexity was not necessary, and changed this so that the majority of content is swipable left/right to view more. This brought the app more in line with other popular design patterns used by Netflix, Apple, etc. Most importantly, this interaction was implemented across the board, so the user only had to learn one pattern.
The app had utilized aggressive margins, padding, and font sizes. We often could not fit the content we needed to in the space provided. I tightened up our margins and adjusted our fonts to make it so that our design would be more flexible.
All caps was over-leveraged. All-caps are harder to read, and so I used sentence casing for most cases.