Overview
Vibes was created during the pandemic by a founder and his mother who were suffering from COVID. They wanted to keep track of the pain and emotions they were feeling so he built a platform where they could do that. Since cultivating emotional intelligence isn't widely accepted yet, the founder realized this could be an area of opportunity to develop a tool that can help users learn to be emotionally intelligent. Within this emotional intelligence building app is a meditation practice, journaling templates, and of course, the ability to log your emotions and build awareness of them.
Vibes was created during the pandemic by a founder and his mother who were suffering from COVID. They wanted to keep track of the pain and emotions they were feeling so he built a platform where they could do that. Since cultivating emotional intelligence isn't widely accepted yet, the founder realized this could be an area of opportunity to develop a tool that can help users learn to be emotionally intelligent. Within this emotional intelligence building app is a meditation practice, journaling templates, and of course, the ability to log your emotions and build awareness of them.
Role
UI/UX Designer
UI/UX Designer
Objective
Take user research and create a responsive design for a new feature called the body scan to engage and increase monthly active users. This feature will include playback audio and logging abilities.
Take user research and create a responsive design for a new feature called the body scan to engage and increase monthly active users. This feature will include playback audio and logging abilities.
Obstacles
It wasn't clear who our target audience was and what their needs were
It wasn't clear who our target audience was and what their needs were
Duration
Two months
View the solution
problem
Vibes wasn't retaining the users we were using to test our designs and give us feedback. There were a lot of ideas for features that could be added and offered to users, such as meditation, but we had to decide which features to include to retain users. How can we increase the average monthly active users by 20%? If we include a meditation practice, will this engage users and increase our monthly active users?
design process
user research
To better understand our audience, I created a survey asking demographic questions and asking questions about their mental health tools. I had 30 responses, and I interviewed qualifying participants who said yes, they used mobile apps, websites, or services for their mental health.
You can view the survey questions I used in the google doc
Summary
These we're my findings from the 30 survey responses. 90% of survey respondents were female, 56% were between the age of 21-29, 63% meditate, and 56% said they journaled.
Interviews
I interviewed five participants from my survey responses. I selected participants based on their responses. We needed to define our target audience so I interviewed participants that shared some of their mental health practices/tools to understand what they liked about their current practice and what could be improved. The users that participated in my interviews enabled me to understand their mental health habits, motivations, challenges, and reasons for using or not using a mental health app for their mental health goals.
View my interview questions in the google doc
Interview participant
A question I asked during my interviews
Affinity Map
To develop further insights, I needed to break down the responses from my interviews. I used an affinity map to identify similar themes to better understand what the users truly desired. What features we're they most interested in? What feature could Vibes offer to our users?
• Turns out, four out of five interviewees shared that personal insights were important and valuable to them.
• All participants did some kind of journaling in the past and/or in the present.
• Four out of five participants meditate using an app.
Primary Personas
I created two primary personas using insights from my user interviews. These personas helped us define our target audience and I used them to guide my design decisions. These personas were only the start of our discovery and I'll need to do more research to use and apply them to these personas for a more rigorous approach.
design thinking - the how might we method
To finalize my synthesis, I created How Might We (HMW) statements. Despite valuable insights from the survey and user interviews, it wasn't clear how important and satisfied users were with emotional intelligence building tools. We agreed that the new features to Vibes would be journaling and meditation to build a robust mental health app.
The MVP of this app would include meditation and journaling. The mediation feature will be pushed to production first and then the journaling templates to follow. This HMW statement was a method for me to articulate what my user's needs were.
How might we integrate a new feature such as meditation to increase the active monthly users?
ideation
Taking the stakeholder's goals, I sketched out the steps the user would take to complete the body scan. These sketches were intended to evaluate what my designs could possibly look like and it would ensure that my designs align with the CEO's vision.
Low-fidelity Wireframes
As a team, we realized we needed instructions for new users. Additionally, we weren't sure if we needed a male and female voice for the body scan audio. I shared that since our personas were females and we were in the mental health space, it would be in the user's best interest if we gave them the option to pick a male or female voice. Some women have past trauma that involves men; therefore, they can be retraumatized when they hear a male voice.
To provide a trauma-informed service, we decided to include two options; a male and female voice. My timeline didn't allow for user tests with these wireframes but these wireframes did help me and my team understand where user frustrations might come up.
Usability Testing
The goal of this test was to discover usability issues with the Body Scan feature. I asked participants to find the body scan feature and go through it as if they were a first time user.
Participants: 3
Duration: 15 - 20 minutes
Methodology: Remote moderated usability testing using Zoom
I analyzed my findings from the participant responses using an affinity map to pull insights.
Final Designs
Using feedback from stakeholders and users, these are the final designs for the new feature; the body scan.
Next steps & Takeaways
What's next?
• The success of this feature will need to be measured.
• I need feedback from users to understand if this body scan feature would bring them back to the app. Will this increase monthly active users?
• I will continue to ask questions such as "How important is it to you to track your mood?" to define our target audience and find supporting evidence to answer why more females use this app and fewer males.
Takeaways
• I learned, if possible, to work closely with engineers. It's beneficial to have them involved early and often in the design process to know what they are capable of coding within the timeframe.
