Overview

The Meditation App is a mobile application designed for users to curate their own meditative journey. Offering a diverse range of exercises and narrators users of all abilities can explore and build a customized practice for their needs.

The app includes a variety of techniques, difficulty levels, and mediums with the ability to store, save, and share content. It is optimized to suit both quick relaxation needs as well as long term practices that can build over time.

Simple & quick, with depth

For those in a hurry, or anyone turning to the app in a moment of heightened stress, the time and effort of figuring out where to begin is minimized, so that beginning an exercise straight away is easy.

For those wishing to delve deeper, they can personalize preferences and sift through more options with various articles and videos to explore. 

Building a Practice

To build a practice, you can add more exercises (as many as desired) to any or all of the three categories of yoga, meditation, and journaling. Instead of selecting begin, you tap the add icon and the exercises automatically populate in your practice.

An Experience that You Curate

Aside from adjusting preferences and other settings, once a practice is built, it can be reordered and the option of adding/saving/deleting an exercise is always available.

The Design Process

Understanding the Challenge

There is substantial evidence to show that meditation aides in reducing stress, yet many people have trouble knowing where to begin. It is difficult to find enough variety to customize a practice that suits user needs, without being overwhelming. 

Explorative Findings

Preliminary research into meditation showed that the scope as a practice is much larger than what many may define under the category; expanding to yoga, journaling, breathing exercises, sounds, and many variations within each category. 

The first difficulty was in narrowing down and categorizing these techniques in a way that people would find intuitive and authentic to the practice. The Meditation App focuses on three categories of this holistic form of stress reduction: yoga, meditation, and journaling. This selection was informed by the research that precedes.

Research

Surveys

Surveys showed that people generally prefer photo content to written content in apps.

They also do not want to be overwhelmed by choice, and would prefer a catered limited set of options to start with the ability to explore more should they choose.

Competitive Analysis

The market is flooded with various meditation apps, but most existing meditation apps do not offer many options to customize a practice to suit the users needs. There are many methods and any yogi will tell you that you must do what works best for you. If someone is interested in guided meditations but dislikes the voice of the narrator, they may decide to disregard the entire practice instead of finding a different technique or narrator that they do like. 

Top competitors in the industry are Headspace and Calm. These apps topped out most lists for best meditation apps with others such as Insight Timer, Stop, Breathe & Think, and The Mindfulness App (among others) making appearances depending on the list. Headspace and Calm are Editor’s Choice picks on app stores, and both come in at over 10 million downloads on Google Play store, with star ratings of 4.5 and above.

User Interviews

User interviews provided a sounding board to hear directly from potential users what their thoughts and needs were regarding a potential meditation app. They also doubled as a way to check whether insights from survey results and the competitive analysis were indeed accurate.

Interviewees varied in age, gender, and ethnicity, providing a greater spectrum of opinion in an effort to provide inclusive results that would be used to create broad appeal.

To see what potential users of the app would need, user interviews with people who have shown an interest in meditation in the past was necessary. The interviews examined what has kept people from following through on their practice, what has drawn others in, and how to bridge the two to meet the needs of both hesitant newcomers, and experienced yogis.

User Personas

Key Takeaways

In the creation of the app, understanding both the core values of the practice, and the needs of the user are critical in order for it to provide value to it’s users.

Responses showed that an important component in retaining users would be to provide enough variety in the difficulty and depth of exercises to allow for constant growth and evolution. By including this component of variety, or levels, it would keep the user engaged, while also maintaining the integrity of the meditative practice itself.

Time seemed to be critical to people, so offering filters based on the amount of time one had, and short exercises that could be inserted in gaps throughout the day were immediately placed on the must have list. Ability to filter based on difficulty level was another consistent response from interviewees. 

User Journey

Insights from the research shaped the user persona which would become the main influencer in any decision making in the design of the app.

The user journey helped to put the entire flow in perspective and informed the site map for the app. 

The Moscow and Feature Prioritization matrices helped to narrow down the features users prioritized: ease of use, authenticity, and customization, for a quick way to unwind that can be taken deeper with time.

User Flow/Site Map

Both the content of the app and user persona informed the structure of the  pages and layout of content on each page in the wireframing phase. To ensure a simple user flow, there are only three pages: settings, home, and profile. 

The settings page allows the user to alter filters that affect the curated results. 

The home page is where each practice is chosen, and doubles as an explore page by adding the simple element of a shuffle icon. In addition to settings changes to personalize results, the home page also offers an icon to reorder the elements chosen for any given practice. One, two, or all three of the categories (yoga, meditation, journaling) can be filled, and multiple exercises can be chosen for each category. 

The profile page, will log saved content, previous practices, and offers a journal. 

High Fidelity

Branding

To maintain authenticity, the branding on the app is minimal, because it is not about the brand, it is about the practice. No distractions, just a space to clear your mind.

Moodboards

• Color Palette: Earthy/soothing

• Typography: Simple/clear

• Icons/Illustrations: Photo based, and minimalistic

• Naming & Logo: Minimal branding so that the focus is on the value the app brings, not the brand itself.

• Micro-Interactions & Animation: Smooth transitions, nothing jarring.

Style Guide