Concept project · Wellbeing · 2 week sprint

Balance

A 2 week design sprint for the meditation app Balance. In this project I worked in a team of four. Myself, Leo Wong, Alina Tamciuc, India Berrow.

Three phones showcasing the Balance app designs

The client

Who are Balance?

Balance is a meditation app that offers personalised meditation programs based on the meditator’s experience and needs.

The brief

Brief

Balance believes that new meditators find meditation to be difficult and frustrating because their minds get distracted more easily during meditation, preventing them from enjoying the practice and creating a regular habit. Balance are considering partnering with Muse who make wearable brain sensing headbands, devices that measure brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) sensors.

Objectives

  • 01 Understand why users can’t stay engaged and what's keeping them from building a long-term meditation habit
  • 02 Discover if using bioinformatics would increase engagement and retention
  • 03 Explore visual solutions to help display data from EEG headbands
  • 04 Pitch a user-validated prototype to Muse to begin conversations around collaboration opportunities

    • Discover

    Competitive / Comparative Analysis

    To kick things off we went ahead by doing some research about the meditation app industry. We created a feature inventory to see what competitors have to offer and compared it with Balance. We learned that Balance offers most of the features apart from Social Sharing and Group Meditation.

    Feature inventory table

    Explore

    User Interviews

    We interviewed 6 users to understand the problem users are facing.

    Interview insights

  • “I find meditation difficult”
  • “I like the guided sessions”
  • “I like to measure consistency with streaks”
  • “I feel tracking makes me anxious”
  • “I'm skeptical about using bioinformatics”
  • “I can see the benefits (bioinformatics), but I'm not tempted”
  • “I would be curious to learn more about myself (using bioinformatics)”

    • Persona

    Created a persona “Penny” based off insights from research and interviews.

    Persona Penny

    Problem statement

    Penny wants to make meditation a habit to experience the benefits of a consistent practice, but finds it hard to commit.

    How might we…

    Brainstormed some HMW’s to give ideas on how to help Penny.

    Develop

    Design Studio

    We got together and did a design studio bringing our ideas to light on how we each would solve Penny's problem. Voting on our favourite ideas which we would bring forward to the next stage of the process creating the low-fidelity prototype.

    User Flow

    Making a user flow was useful to show Penny's journey through the new feature on the Balance app we are trying to create.

    Low-Fidelity and User Tests

    Always so interesting moving from sketches to low-fi however due to us using the Balance app as a base we ended up being in a mid-fi instead of low-fi stage.

    Low-fidelity test screens for Balance

    Deliver

    Mid-Fidelity to High-Fidelity

    Due to our first design being more mid-fi we made adjustments to it based on the feedback we received and converted it to high-fi. Below are some of the screens from both paths Penny takes.

    High-fidelity screens

    Testing High-Fidelity

    We tested the high-fi prototype after implementing the feedback we received from the previous tests.

    Reflection

    Summary

    Moving forward

  • More user testing
  • Incorporate and iterate the prototype from user feedback
  • Testing out more functions we proposed but we don’t have time to do at this moment, e.g. The Thought Bin, The Chat Room Function
  • Improve the provided information about Instructors

    • Takeaway

    I learned so much during this 2 week sprint, mostly to test as much as possible. I feel we missed out on testing in the earlier stages and went to mid-fi too fast, something I will take forward in other sprints.