uxdesign.cc – User Experience Design — Medium | Kevin Wu

The work in this article is a joint effort between Kevin Wu and Rodney Edwards. Fascinated by the benefits of meditation and mindfulness, we conducted several design studies over a 4 week period. These studies uncovered large gaps within the premise regarding immersion, habit building, and positive feedback loops. The following article delineates our process and proposed solutions from the findings.

Disclaimer: we are not affiliated with Headspace in any way, just two designers working on a passion project.

Image credit: Headspace

1. What / Why

What is Headspace?

Headspace is a guided meditation application that is dedicated to improving the health and happiness of people all over the world. These guided sessions, led by the Narrator, Andy, span across a vast number of topic “Packs,” ranging from Health, Happiness, Sports, and Work.

Check out their site here: https://www.headspace.com

Why we chose Headspace?

Despite having no prior knowledge with meditation techniques, or even the general practice, we were immediately captivated by Headspace’s vision and the benefits that could be achieved by taking 10 minutes a day to meditate.

We wanted the opportunity to flex our design muscles in a live project — a challenge for us to potentially identify hidden-gems that those at Headspace, or other designers, might find beneficial.

Thus, we set our goals to develop one implementable feature that followed (to the best of our ability) Headspace’s existing brand assets and ecosystem.

2. A snapshot of Our Solution

Glam shot!

Our solution, “Taking a Moment,” provides a quick self-reflection on your current state-of-mind while tracking the evolution of your emotional state.

3. Initial Discovery

We focused on understanding the 10-day trial to give us a breadth of users to interview.

For our project, we prioritized conversion rate and retention rate as our key metrics to optimize for as we assume they correlate most with Headspace’s bottom line.

Research Strategy

We generated 3 primary problem statements that informed our research approach.

1. How does the user’s attitude change pre-session to post-session?
2. How does the atmosphere affect the overall experience?
3. Is there a point within the 10-day trial where the user fully buys into the
   premise, or drops off from the experience?

Diary Study

Because a new user’s perception of an experience is quite capricious in nature, we determined that a diary study spanning the duration of the 10-day trial, with follow up interviews, would best fit our needs.

Capturing how perception evolved over time served as great feedback to answer our original problem statements.

Other important factors for the study included the participants’ position, setting, and distraction levels.

Sample questions of from our Diary Study

Initial Results

Our study revealed some big insights into how each participant’s perception of the 10-day trial experience had developed over time. The study was conducted with 7 participants each with little-to-no experience with meditation and guided meditation.

We placed heavy importance on completing one session per-day, but if a session was missed the participant could substitute a diary entry explaining the rationale for skipping.

This information provided a lens into major friction points within the application’s feedback loop.

4. Deeper Insights

Affinity mapping exercise

A precursor to immersion

Many participants felt like it was necessary to meditate in the exact same location, light candles, dim the lights, or play soft music to be fully immersed.

Vacillating focus: immersion and distraction

56% of the 26 diary entries ranked the session at an “Average” rating over the duration of the study. Our follow up interviews revealed that participants felt that instances within the sessions were polarizing: equal parts distracting and equal parts immersive. These moments were mostly filled with a disconnect with the Narrator’s voice, or when the Narrator broke immersion by interjecting with a jarring statement when the user was already focused.

Fleeting feelings

Almost every participant praised the positive effects the session had on their overall psyche. However, those effects were incredibly fleeting — participants felt a sense of regression by the next day.

Lacking personalization

Participants expected the process to be personalized to their own experience, but they were let down when they realized that “their” journey was actually a boiler-plate generic path.

Hard to be consistent

By day 4, participants began to indicate difficulty staying on schedule. Often times participants would rather continue working, watching tv, or simply do nothing over starting the session.

5. The drop off

It was interesting to see how effective taking 10-minutes a day to meditate was in improving an individual’s mood/feeling for others as well. Yet, despite the clear benefits, participants still showed a clear difficulty with consistency. Our hypothesis was that participants placed unrealistic expectations on how quickly they should “feel” the long term benefits of meditation.

Total of 7 participants — individuals began dropping off by day 4 of the study

“I missed the session for the given date. I had completely forgotten to perform a session and instead spent the evening working on my homework assignments”

A study found that forming new habits take an average of 66 days, the real range being anywhere between 18 and 254 days.

This information begged the question:

How might we reinforce the long-term benefits of meditation?

6. Ideation

We kicked off brainstorming by framing the discussions around 4 major design challenges:

• How might we help the user achieve their most immersive meditative state?
• How might we communicate the user’s progress towards mindfulness?
• How might we create a more personable and trusting connection between the user and narrator?
• How might we design more inclusively to account for varying preferences?

Example of brainstorming

Our ideation session resulted in a myriad of ideas: from chatbot, buddy systems, audio-centric experiences, to mood-based experiences and optimized push notifications. After much deliberation, our priorities naturally revealed themselves as we had a predilection for ideas that centered around habit building and ideas that could potentially improve a user’s focus during the session.

Structuring the experience

We found that supporting functionality, such as “My Journey,” appeared to be a place for users to revisit their session in the context it was completed in — a place to track and monitor progress. The existing experience however, felt rather disconnecting. It seemed to serve as merely a log, rather than an indicator of true progression, and the cherry picked quote from their session some days/weeks/months ago did not seem to resonate with users beyond the initial day.

Example of Default Journey

This provided enough ammunition to catalyze our version of a more immersive, personal experience — a journey that truly felt like your own.

Examples of early stage wireframes

A Natural Call to Action

Currently before the end of every session, the narrator (Andy) highlights the importance of reflection in meditation and requests that the user examines how they feel.

This sparked our curiosity. If reflection is such an integral part to meditation and the individual’s growth, why is there no place to document it for posterity? Our hypothesis was that by physically capturing the user’s current state-of-mind, coupled with the ability to revisit it any amount of time later via “My Journey,” users would be further inspired and motivated by the benefits of meditation. Those feelings of clarity and calmness that were previously fleeting, would now be inscribed within the application indefinitely.

7. Introducing . . . Taking a Moment

The days are long, but the years are short. “Taking a Moment” guides you through examining your state-of-mind, while providing a deeper lens into your growth and mindfulness journey.

Feature 1–4, reads left to right

Feature 1 — Music, volume control

Integrate your own music, or leverage Headspace curated pack basic music to further immerse your experience.

Feature 2 — Today I feel

Taking a Moment elicits your state-of-mind through a curated string of words that are relevant to the pack you chose.

Feature 3 — A moment from my day…

Take pleasure in capturing all the good that’s happening each day in a quick, concise sentence.

Feature 4 — Viewing your progression

See the evolution of your journey by reliving your best moments over and over again.

8. Breaking down the features

It felt natural to insert “Taking a Moment” at the end of a session, and right before the current “Well Done” screen, which provides a quote relevant to the session and some personalized statistics.

User flow with insertions in blue

Asking the right questions

A critical part of reflection lies in evoking the proper set of emotions from the individual. In order to do so, we had to carefully pose the question in the right way. We favored copy that felt simple and unrestrictive, eventually landing on two questions:

1. Today I feel…
2. A moment to remember from today was…

Today I feel…

This phrase was concise, yet broad enough for our needs. A simple question that engages the user to enough begin the self-reflection process.

Evolution of the input screen (V1 left, Final right)

The answer choices provide word strings that subsume a set of related emotions. To accommodate for the range of emotions a user might feel, we decided that three word strings would provide enough flexibility and better representation. Despite our research only focusing on the 10-day trial, we felt that word strings should be related to the selected packs from the subscription model(Regret, Focus, Etc), that way we could better predict how a user feels at the end of a session.

Contextualized word strings based on the pack

A moment to remember from my day was…

Drawing inspiration from the hedonic treadmill and the one sentence happiness journal, a user could input a quick sentence documenting a delightful moment from their day. By doing this repeatedly and demanding a focus on the good, this would slowly become a prodigious record that the user can enjoy at a later point.

“A moment to remember” modal screen

Redesigning the “Well Done” screen

Similar to the existing “Well Done” screen, we wanted to summarize and contextualize the end of the session while providing positive reinforcement for the user.

Current “Well Done” screen after session completion

The existing screen was competing for real estate with our feature. Discussion around whether to sunset the original quote was a long and tortuous process. In our follow up interviews with the participants, we had received positive feedback regarding the quote at the time of completion. However, our data showed that users’ feeling towards older session quotes did not resonate with them to the same degree, as they had somewhat forgotten the lessons learned.

These insights were enough signal to go ahead with our design decision to replace the quote.

Final version of the output screen

My “Moment” card

In order to illustrate the level of intimacy and personalization we were aiming for within the app, we redesigned the current card within “My Journey” to include a sample of the word strings previously chosen.

We drew inspiration from corner flip-book comics. The vision was to have users similarly scroll (or flip!) through the timeline and observe how their own behavior and attitudes have shaped over time.

This led to challenges around fitting enough context in each card, and what we should emphasize, without overloading and congesting the limited real estate. In the end, propagating and highlighting each word chosen in the string felt the most important and would resonate the most with the user on a passing glance.

“My Journey” section with the new moment card

Your last moment

This feature was born of the importance we placed on having an additional feedback loop of reminders of previous moments. Since the “Home” screen is the first viewport for the user, we believed that a having a quick overview of a previous moment would provide positive reinforcement.

Moment card as the star of the existing “Home” page

Music integration

Our data revealed the importance of music and mood were in achieving an immersive state. Headspace can leverage their recent partnership with Spotify for ambient sounds, or create custom ones similar to the Sound: Sleep singles.

The inclusion of the sliders were aimed to solve for jarring interruptions during the session breaks. Users can tweek the volume of both the Narrator’s voice and music to a balance of their liking.

Two sliders for maximum flexibility: controlling both narrator and music volume

9. Next Steps — if we had more time

Due to the natural constraints we placed at the outset of the project, we de-prioritized a set of tasks to meet our deadline.

If we had more time, we would have:

• Run multiple iterations of concept testing before finalizing a design
• Qualified the design by running an additional diary study and comparing the results against the original data set
• Explored other Headspace components, such as “Goals”, “Buddies”, and “My Stats”

Thanks for reading! Feel free to visit our websites below to learn more:
–Kevin Wu and Rodney Edwards.

A feature proposal to Headspace was originally published in UX Design Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.