UX Research, UX Design
Headspace
Project Overview
Over the past few years, there have been many growing conversations surrounding mental health. Although resources aimed at improving mental health exist, many people find that they are difficult and frustrating to implement in their daily lives.
Headspace is one of the leading meditation apps on the market. In fact, they claim to reduce stress by 14% in 10 days. Through our redesign, we explored ways of presenting Headspace's expansive library in manageable interactions.
Timeline:
January - May 2023
Role:
UX Research, UX Design (Explore, Filtering)
Team:
Jen, Zainab, Kyuwon, Azaan
The Guiding Question
How might we rethink and expand Headspace’s current functionality to be more inclusive for different lifestyles and personal needs?
01: Understanding the Wellness Space
As we read the literature surrounding mental health and well-being, we quickly came to the realization that this terminology is inconsistent. We needed to clarify these terms for us moving forward.
Key Words:
Mindfullness: the practice of non-judgemental awareness of present moments
Meditation: the avenue or technique used to practice mindfulness
Competitive Analysis
We also conducted a competitive analysis by comparing Headspace to five other leading mental health and wellness apps.
Interviews
We sat down with
20 college students
for hour-long interviews.
We also had an interview with a licensed therapist to gain a professional perspective on the matter.
02: Developing Insights
Key Findings
After reviewing our data through sessions of affinity mapping, we found four main patterns in our qualitative data.
User Journeys and Personas
From our analysis, we identified two main members of our user audience with varying goals and needs to help guide our design decisions moving forward.
03: Initial Ideation
Information Architecture
There is not a doubt that Headspace is one of leading meditation apps on the market. For that reason, we focused on making small improvements to enhance the overall functionality and highlight the content instead of changing the entire Headspace framework.
One of Headspace's strengths is the variety of resources they provide. However, this was also a source of frustration when assessing potential user journeys. In our brainstorming sessions, we focused on developing a mental model (heavily influenced by Spotify) aimed at reducing the cognitive load in the in-app experience.
Here are the areas we saw room for growth:
Paper Prototypes
We created low fidelity sketches to quickly conceptualize our initial ideas.
Mid-Fi Wireframes
After rounds of internal and external feedback, we developed over 50 screens to highlight our main proposals.
04: Putting it All Together
Our Proposals
Click through the presentation to see our final design suggestions.
The Final Prototype
Follow the highlighted blue areas to click through our prototype. For the best experience, please view the high fidelity prototype in full screen.
05: Reflections
Throughout the semester, I enjoyed working with UX designers with different design approaches and skills. From this, I learned new techniques, shortcuts, and perspectives to implement in my future projects. If I had more time, I would like to gather further quantitative data to gauge key performance indicators (KPIs). For my specific designs, I would like compare the time needed to find a specific meditation in the old and new versions of the explore page. I would also like to gather data on the use of the filtering feature by looking at the number of clicks.
Overall, I would like to give a shout-out to my incredible co-leads, Jen and Zainab, for pushing the team to be very particular and reflective in the design process. I was challenged to have a rationale for every choice, no matter how mundane or inconsequential the addition seemed. If you would like to have a chat about our decisions, feel free to reach out at taychan723@gmail.com.
