Meditate Awake is a mobile app aimed at increasing beginner meditation sessions from 5 to 20 minutes through factors such as progress tracking and community engagement.
Team Tools Used Research Methods
Justin Salamanca, User Researcher Sketch Contextual Interviews
Nelson Gomez, UX/UI Designer InVision Usability Testing
Erik Howerbush, CEO Zeplin Surveys
Adobe Illustrator
The Breakdown
Apr '18 - May '18
Meditate Awake is a startup based in Santa Monica, California that wants to break into the fitness/meditation industry by creating a meditation app for beginners.
I was brought on to help gather data and conduct research. During my involvement, I took part in the ideation process and conducted user interviews, usability tests, and surveys for branding and mobile app development. I did not create the designs for the screens and prototype, but I helped the Sr. UX Designer, Nelson Gomez, in wireframing and assembling the prototype.
The Challenge
As a meditation instructor and influencer, Meditate Awake CEO Erik Howerbush was interested in creating a meditation app for beginners that focused on developing better meditative habits. Thus, the main issue was:
"How might we educate and facilitate beginner meditators to improve their meditation time from 5 minutes to 20 minutes?"
Our Hypothesis: We can get beginner meditators to a 20 minute average meditation time by helping them keep track of their progress and by keeping them accountable for their habit by encouraging community engagement.
The Process
In order to keep scope amidst changing expectations, we agreed and set a couple of goals with the client:
1.) Streamline the meditation and goal-setting process through an MVP
2.) Connect the process of meditation and goal-setting to an actual daily life experience
3.) Set up a quantitative way to measure how the product is doing in terms of fulfilling the user's goals
Sample persona for one of our target audiences
In order to speed up the discovery phase, we began research by observing dairy studies on YouTube of beginner meditators whose journeys ranged from one week up to one month. Furthermore, we also watched expert classes and talks about meditation to see what advice currently exists for beginners.
After getting a grasp on meditation and its current relationship with users, I began conducting user interviews on two demographics: those who followed Erik Howerbush on social media for meditation, and our proposed target audience, middle income women ages 21-40. From these interviews, I found a couple of key findings:
1.) People have different reasons for meditating, some of which include sleep, self-improvement, and mental health.
2.) Beginners have a hard time focusing and letting go of thoughts while meditating.
3.) There is a clear divide in expectations and opinions between beginner meditators and experienced meditators (target audience vs. actual audience).
Exploring the Flow
User flow diagram for mobile app
Establishing a good user experience was the first thing we considered when ideating and designing the wireframes and user flow of the app.
In a space filled with rising competitors such as Calm and HeadSpace, we wanted to stand out by focusing on our objective, increasing beginner meditation sessions from 5 to 20 minutes, and frame it in a product that's easy to use, is aesthetically appealing to our target audience, and delights users enough with its additional features that users keep coming back and develop good meditation habits as a result.
Whiteboarding & Wireframing
Screenshot of wireframes from InVision Freehand
After establishing a user flow and list of feature priorities, I met with the client to discuss how we can hold users accountable for their mediation habits. From collaborating on InVision Freehand, we eventually came to two main solutions that we wanted to test:
1.) The impact and perceived usefulness of an onboarding screen prior to beginning a meditation session
2.) Incorporating features that would facilitate and increase user engagement in an app that takes a user-only perspective (meditation)
First Attempt
From user interviews, we decided to create a screen that dispels common meditation myths for beginners and inform users on the basics before starting a session. Although optional and skippable, we created a separate screen solely for onboarding in order to attract users' attention before beginning meditation.
Our take on how to incorporate community engagement was to create a community of like-minded people. However, the client also wanted to start off doing this by sharing his meditation-related content and social media as a feature. With this in mind, we also created a lifestyle page and I began setting up user tests to show users what our product can offer and gauge the perceived value of each feature.
We created a progress tracking feature in addition in order to help users develop and keep good meditation habits.
From there, we assembled a prototype and I began testing. The main findings we discovered were that users thought of meditation as a personal experience and thus having social features wasn't a priority in their eyes and wasn't effective in motivating them to keep meditating. Furthermore, our target audience (middle income women ages 21-40) didn't find our client's content interesting of valuable. However, users reported positive feedback on the progress tracking and onboarding features.
Second Iteration
After presenting our research findings, we began integrating the user feedback into our design.
Given the nature of our feedback, we decided to focus more on users' self-growth within the app. As such, we added a goal setting feature that's users can track quantitatively and qualitatively through the progress screen. At the same time, these goals aren't concrete: users are able to flexibly change their goals at any time.
Finally, the client still wanted to include a community aspect to the final product in order to retain a competitive edge over other meditation apps. As a result, we thought of a new way to do this:
Imagine that you are meditating through this app. Throughout this session, the narrator ask you a question audibly, and you will get a chance to voice or express your thought. After completing your meditation, you'll be asked if you want to participate and record your answer in order to track your personal growth and share your responses with others for today's daily meditation.
With permission from the user, voice recordings can be assembled into a highlight reel that contains the best and most insightful responses to daily meditations.
The Result
After incorporating our new insights into the final product, I conducted a round of usability testing.
From usability testing, we received an overall positive reaction from respondents. Users loved the fact that they can set goals, schedule their next meditation, and track their progress. However, some users reported confusion with the color scheme and identifying meaning in the progress screen and community engagement features, which was edited and fixed afterwards.
Current Situation
After ideating and conducting user research and testing of the app, I completed the terms of my contract. As of present, the client is currently taking the next step and working on creating the company website and having the developers finish building out the mobile app's back-end on iOS.