UX Research + Ui Design

UX Research – App Design  /  2.5 weeks  /  3 UX Designers
My Role: UX Research, UX/UI Design
Tools: Figma App (Wireframes, Prototypes, Mockups), Illustrator, Paper, Pen & Google Drive, Typeform, Miro app, Trello, Material Design Color Tools, Zoom.
Skills: UX Research, App UI, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Wireframe, Prototyping.

Design Stressfit App

Our goal job: How might we improve the experience
for Stressfit App clients to set their goals and create
mindfulness habits.

Overview

Stressfit Story

X

Stressfit is a mindfulness holistic business that moves through a range of corporate clients to bring mindfulness workshops to work environments around Australia.

Is a mindfulness platform that educates employees to enhance mental wellbeing. In order to help the workforce how to properly handle stress & work-related pressures through a mixture of holistic techniques, meditation & sound design.

COVID-19 TIME has reintroduced society to a world of uncertainty and adversity, with sharp increases in mental health cases around the world. High levels of anxiety and frustrations are prevalent. COVID played a large part in Stressfit accelerating their plan in order to get the call “Mindsnacks”, short holistic guided exercises that are designed to be fit into busy agenda and build positive habits in life by using their traditional meditation techniques and technology.

Understand People in the COVID

Firstly, we wanted to understand people’s routines and which problems they are facing during COVID-19.

We surveyed 18 people, the results were that people were struggling with their routines, and people do meditations to relieve.

We wanted to dig deeper. I interviewed 15 people, from different demographics and different places,  20 -70 years old, couples with kids, single people, work at home, lost their job, living alone.

Some of the questions I did

1-How are you coping with social distancing and working from home? How did you feel about it?

2- As the COVID-19 pandemic and its far-reaching implications continue to unfold globally and in our community, it’s normal for people to experience a wide range of thoughts, feelings, and reactions. How do you describe those feelings? How do you manage these feelings? What coping mechanisms do you use to deal with these feelings?

3- There have been rapid changes to our way of life (e.g., study, work, social gatherings), and disrupted plans. Are you concerned? How do you typically manage uncertainty?

4 – How has your routine changed since working from home? What is your new routine? Are you happy with it?

5 – There are lots of great apps and youtube videos that you can use to guide you through breathing techniques and meditation that can help ease your anxiety and clear your mind. Which are you using? Why do you like it?

6 – Habit building is a key aspect of this project. Have you ever successfully taken up or dropped a habit? How did you go about this? Would you be interested in mastering the art of habit building?

Finding

The Covid-19 has made people have a combination of changeable feelings in a short time:

Routines Change, poor sleep, lack of exercise, unbalanced diet, lack of information, economic challenges, lost jobs, and isolation. These are some of the problems are people struggle in quarantine.

Most of the feelings are frustration, anxiety, fear, loneliness, uncertain

One of the big challenges
when it comes to working
remotely are

• Keeping your work and home lives separate
• Lack of motivation in isolation
• Frustrated with productivity levels
• Mindset to comply with all the tasks
• Keep the routines

How People are Managed

• In the research, 90% of people use mindfulness apps for meditation. The 30% do exercise
• “Maintaining a connection with social groups and family is necessary”
• Don’t Get Too Sucked in by the News
• Read, Netflix, painting
• Positives thoughts
• Live day by day
• Trying to establishing a family routine

A World Without COVID-19

Our team was lucky to receive past research in regards to StressFit’s product development strategy. This gave us a lot of groundwork which formed part of our research moving forward.
Some key points from their research were:
– The Majority of Stress is Work-Related
– Stress has an impact on sleep, quality of life (work/life balance) & personality / Identity.
– Stress translates to loss of objectivity & a feeling of lack of control.

Personas

We developed two distinct personas to synthesize the Coronavirus previous research and to highlight y target users’ goals, needs, and pain points.

We compared a Persona in a World without COVID-19

Journey Map

Competitor Analysis

In order to better understand this industry and find out where the new app we are designing in the currently fit within the market, we conducted a competitor analysis.

We focused on big 3 Holistic apps that were mentioned it the interviews and it has a similar target market.

Along with the analysis, we included all the features list of the competitor apps and compering with the new app. Also, this helps us to understand how we can differentiate from our competitors.

We found ourselves banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out what we could do, that hasn’t been done before.

Stressfit Old Prototype

Prototype Usability Test

Stressfit has asked us to test the existing prototype that they haven’t released yet. An app for their Mind Snack – short holistic exercise hits that are designed to fit into your busy schedule.

I conducted 13 interviews after our participants used the prototype by doing the Mind Snack (short meditations) for 7 days and the findings were:

Most of the users have done Deep Sleep, Setting Goals, and Gratitude Mind Snack.

Mind Snack Finding:

• Different device.
• Cutting the explanation in two.
• Different explanations for each mind snack.
• People like that are easy, simple modern music and short.
• It has storytelling behind the meditation.

Suggestions features would like:

• A Journal that helps to keep the progress.
• The app gives a suggestion like, personalized mentor a snack that user needs at that moment.
• Reminds: Alarm or messages to say take 10 min to do you mind snack.
• The Minds snacks have to say the durations.
• Emojis at the begin and the end keep your mood track.
• Used in sleep mode.

Workshop to Prioritize Key Problems

The research phase helped us to understand the problem space to a high degree. As an app-based solution was an entirely new direction for Stress Fit, it allowed us creative freedom to explore in any given direction. This was great!!!, however, whilst building out our Business Model Canvas we could not seem to differentiate ourselves from the competition.

At this point, we were overwhelmed with the endless directions we could take and defining a unique solution.

Due to this, we decided the best course of action was to conduct a workshop to prioritize key problems.

Once we had that pool of key problems, we voted for the most important problem, reframed it as a challenge and proceeded to ideate solutions for it. Then, took to voting again, on the best solutions. Finally, we placed our highest voted solutions on an Impact effort scale.

Our findings were that the key issue lied within personalization. And our solutions involved personalized motivational quotes, a personified app & a personalized tracker alerting you of your goals being hit or missed.

The team generally had an idea of how we could fulfill most of those solutions, however, the personification was an interesting one that pushed us into deep discussion. How do we personify this app so it’s appropriate for each individual? What does personification look like in the app? What does it sound like? Do we give it a face? etc.

Discover the Problem and Explore Solutions

Problem

The user has problems with stress and sleep, and their really busy lifestyle and workload prevent them from setting aside time to work on themselves and release stress.

Solution

An App that is built around habit-forming principles that encourages mindfulness in your routine.

App Business Model Canvas & Value Proposition

This was the missing piece to our Business model Canvas under the unique value proposition.

• The user-centered Focus: personalized suggestions and program design.
• Strong Awareness & acknowledgment of the user’s emotional state.
• Providing appropriated Mind Snack recommendations from this awareness.

MVP

For People, who want to manage stress, StressFit is a Mindfulness App that assists through a personalized, self-reflective system.

Please drag the most accurate emoji to each feeling.

We knew early on and through user testing that we wanted to use some form of imagery to help users identify how they’re feeling in a fun and comfortable way.

I conducted Card Sorting with 10 participants. The test was to match the basic emojis with different emotions like: Sleep, bored, uncertain, excited, meh, happy, tired, relaxed, anxious, sad, angry, and love.

I thought it was an easy exercise, but not it wasn’t, some of the participants find out the exercise hard because they have to recognize their emotions and associated them with each Emoji.

This process is crucial to the app as it’s the user’s first step which allows the app to diagnose the issue at hand and then suggest the appropriate mixture of Minds Snacks to help the user through their situation.

Ai & Mental Health

We come up with the idea of Conversational Interface is a user interface for computers that emulates a conversation with a real human. Historically, computers have relied on text-based user interfaces and graphical user interfaces to translate the user’s desired action into commands the computer understands.

How would be Artificial Intelligent AI with mindfulness look like?

Our journey with Emotional AI, as it’s called, stemmed from our deliberation with Conversational UI.
What would a Stressfit guide look and sound like? What’s something human that’s overlooked that we can incorporate? Memory and ability to identify habits.

We asked ourselves a lot of questions, but to sum all of this up we’ll give you one example.
An example of how AI can assist in personifying our assistant would be the ability to observes human traits and lasting moods. Instead of being prompted to explain how your feeling every day, maybe the assist would lead with “How was your sleep last night? Are you still having trouble or are you feeling better?”

One of my workmates ended up sitting down on a Zoom call with some of the AI team at IBM and discussing the capabilities of their AI WATSON (Watson is a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language).
We discussed pricing, concepts and the exploration of an AI mental health buddy in the future.

Designing for 5 years’ time…What will that look like?

Working with the client every day gave us an unmatched look into his eyes and what he imagines Stressfit to look like in the future.

Whilst we’re designing an app for today, we need to see it as a stepping stone in a 5-year vision, which details a world where our user would come home and be greeted by our Stressfit Guide, hear about their day and use that information, and information stored over time, to recommend the right remedy. Whether this is suggesting a Mind Snack, some physical exercise, or some Zumba.

Hi-FI & Iteration

The app saw rapid change through user testing & feedback participants.
An emphasis on emojis being a ‘universal language’ of emotion pushed our decision to use it within the design of the app as well. Here in the second version of the Mind Snack Library, you can see a filter to recommend relevant Mind Snacks based on mood.
This was taken out of the next prototype as the “how are you feeling” question was already asked when opening the app. This led to “Mind Snack of the moment” which took information such as how you’re feeling + contextual information such as time of day or whether to recommend a Mind Snack. For example, if you say you’re tired, it would show you a deep sleep mind snack at night, but if you said you’re tired during the morning it may recommend a shower Mind Snack to be played while you’re having your morning shower.

The Wheel of Life

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Wheel of life is for accountability and visibility of where you are where you want to go.

Stress can be induced from a feeling of lack of control so the idea is to regain that control by segmenting your life and focusing on one goal at a time.

This feature can inform the rest of the app on the direction of the user wishes to grow, allowing the app to suggest relevant mind snacks and programs.

The client asked us to add The Wheel of Life in the app because it is one of the features he wants to prompts to help the users built habits with their goals.

The Wheel of Life is an exercise to help you add more balance in your life. It is a tool that is used to evaluate and draw a snapshot of one’s life at a given point in time.

People rate their satisfaction of 8 separate life categories from a scale of  1-10. People then mark what number they would ideally work toward in a given period of time. This representation allows people to see which parts of their life are flourishing and which parts need more work.

Final Product!!!

Next Steps…

• More Usability test of the last Hi-fidelity prototype.
• Test with other Apple devices such as the Apple Watch.
• Further testing & development of conversational UI for the Stressfit Guide (our ideas).
• Customizable UI (color, etc.).
• Event Feature (Public & Private)
• Social Friend Feature

To Sum

Working with the client every day gave us an unmatched look into his eyes and what he imagines Stressfit to look like in the future. We realized that our chatbot MVP was the first step in our process of achieving this Emotional AI concept goal in the future. The client asked us to continue working with the project
Thus, we pushed on…