Client
School Project
RIT
Role
UX/UI, Visual
Time
Fall 2020
Identifying the Problem
During a dark or uncertain period in someone’s life, it is common to feel negative emotions such as neglectedness, anxiety, and loneliness. Mindfulness and gratitude for the support systems and meaningful relationships in one’s life can often be overlooked and undervalued.
A lack of gratitude can lead to low motivation and poor mental health, taking a negative toll on physical well-being. As a result, personality pitfalls, such as narcissism and cynicism, can occur along with a vicious cycle of low self-esteem and depressive symptoms.
Brainstorming a Solution
An app for those who may underestimate the value of gratitude and self-reflection. The app would generate mindful prompts and activities for users to complete daily. Its aim would be to help users build a sense of gratitude, positivity, and self-love— factors that contribute to their overall mental and emotional wellness.
Due to the benefits of accessibility and shareability of television screens, I was newly challenged with designing a concept responsive to TV interfaces.
Designing Mind U’s Main Features
Genres of Mindfulness
Slide through each of the categories to cater to all of the different aspects of mindfulness. Effectively manage your thoughts and feelings, learn helpful breathing techniques, become more aware of your eating habits, and discover new exercises to improve physical well-being all in the same app.
Tutorials and Walkthroughs
Follow step-by-step instructions or video tutorials to complete each mindful exercise, and rate your experiences to help customize your recommendations.
Measure Your Mindfulness
Take a short assessment (The Mindful Attention Awareness Scale) to measure your current level of mindfulness, and your results will be broken down into the five categories shown earlier. That way, you can tell which categories of mindfulness you might need to work on the most. You can retake the test as many times as you want to see how you’ve progressed through using the app.
Designing for an Unfamiliar Environment
Along with benefits such as accessibility and shareability, I also had to take into consideration proper scaling of typography and other interactive aspects in order to enhance the usability of a TV app.
Conducting Content Analysis & Qualitative Interviews
Because the app concept relies heavily on mental and emotional wellness and mindfulness, I decided to explore existing, non-digital solutions to the problem in order to pinpoint any pain points. One of these solutions included the practice of bullet journaling.
Self-Deprecation
“What you need to bullet journal: money, patience, pretty handwriting, plans. Wow, what a surprise, I don’t have any of those.”
Impatience / Stress
“I’d love to do a bullet journal, but I'd stress myself out way too much trying to make it perfect.”
Too Many Materials Needed
“The only thing you need to set up a bullet journal is a journal and a pen... and tons of color pens and rulers and stickers and scissors and tapes and...”
Participatory Cognitive Mapping
After researching and interviewing multiple bullet journal users about their own experiences, I also bullet journaled myself and recorded my own likes and dislikes about the process.
Observation Analysis
Although the process of creating a bullet journal felt like a great creative outlet for me, I noticed the pressure to ensure that each page was aesthetically pleasing, and if I felt that it wasn’t, I was disappointed and frustrated at my ability to be artistic and organized. By the end, I felt more impatient than mindful.
As a result, it became clear to me that the mindful activities in my solution would need to be simple and effortless for users to accomplish, without the need for many external materials.
Developing Personas
The Busy Parent
As a busy working parent, I want to take time for self-care in order to stay grounded and appreciative of the people and things in my life. Because I only have limited free time every day, I don’t want to have to spend too much time or money on the process of mental wellness.
The Anxious Student
As a student who deals with constant stress and anxiety, I want to be able to slow down and keep my thoughts in order. I want to spend a healthy amount of time with myself but learn to focus more on the positives in my life rather than the worries.
The Dejected Employee
As a working adult who feels overwhelmed and hopeless due to current events, I want to feel uplifted, and find hope in the meaningful relationships and things that I am grateful for around me. In doing so, I want to help improve my mental health.
Outlining a User Journey Map
Through journey mapping, I followed The Anxious Student— Angela— who uses the app to help improve her mental health and manage her stress as she begins her school semester.
Competitive / Comparative Analysis
By researching three competing products related to my app concept, I was able to compare and contrast different features and designs. Consequently, I could better consider potential problems users may face as well as efficient solutions to those issues.
Reflectly
Smooth illustrations help to lead users through a variety of emotions and moods. High-quality imagery and photography effectively contrasts with the app’s illustrative style, and calm and comfortable visual design.
Quotes effectively optimize the use of white space, and contrast beautifully with background imagery.
Oak - Meditation & Breathing
Badges that mark a consistent streak or track progress can serve as motivation or inspiration for users to continue to engage with the app. Because wellness is the ultimate goal, small prizes can be enough to reward the user for staying dedicated to that goal.
Focus Meditation
A consistently green color scheme promotes the feeling of calm and reflection, which effectively sets a positive mindset for meditation.
Illustration and rounded corners encourage relaxation and softness, while the app’s layout allows for a comfortable amount of white space.
How Might We…
By listing potential problems users could face while encountering the app, I brainstormed a variety of different ideas to solve those problems efficiently— from the types of mindful activities users would complete to the choices needed for a visually stimulating design.
Through this process, I was able to further consider issues regarding accessibility and inclusion, and create solutions for a more effective user experience. I also became more aware of how I could better optimize the TV interface for these solutions by taking advantage of space, navigation, etc.
Building User Flows
Organizing Wireframes
From my research of positive psychology and its relation to mindfulness, I divided the sets of activities and classified them into five categories: Thoughts, Emotions, Breathing, Eating, and Exercise.
The wireframing process made it clear that the interface would require an icon system or series of images to better clarify to the user what category of mindfulness each slide interaction would represent.
Exploring Visual Direction #1: Summer
With summer comes bright colors and a kind-natured aesthetic, and therefore resulted in a vibrant and smooth visual design.
Exploring Visual Direction #2: Winter
Winter can bring a raw and authentic approach, one that relies on sophistication and minimalism, thus resulting in a cleaner yet more muted design.
Developing Final Visual Design
Due to Mind U’s prioritization of comfortability and self-love, I implemented both the structured organization of the latter moodboard (Winter) and the vibrance and colorfulness of the former moodboard (Summer) in order to best represent the final design.
Conclusion
Challenged with designing for a larger interface like the TV, I was forced to think quickly and creatively yet practically and realistically to begin iterating effective solutions. If I were to return to this project, I would love to further explore the onboarding process of users, especially that which requires their answering of test questions in order to measure their initial level of mindfulness before entering Mind U.