OVERVIEW

Headspace’s mission is clear—they want to improve the health and happiness of the world. Headspace has some social functions within their app, but it lacked robust community features. Leveraging their strong community of users, we had the opportunity to create a community fueled by Headspace that spreads positivity and support with their peers while creating a digital meditation space that allows users to connect and replenish.

Note: This was a hypothetical partnership for a product design exploration assignment.

GRAND FINALE

We created a standalone self-care social app called Oasis with the intention bringing it under Headspace’s product umbrella. We adopted Headspace’s existing colors and their meanings to further drive the partnership. As we continued to iterate on our design, we were able to make some important changes to our initial design concept to better suit the needs of our users. In conceptualizing our product, the principles that we adhered to throughout the process were…

• Help people achieve their self-care goals

• Incentivize people to continue on their self-care journey

• Create a community of friends and like-minded people to support each other through times of struggle

• Create a place of solace in times of need

For a more in-depth look into this project, read my medium article.

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THE PROBLEM

Through research, we wanted to refute or confirm the following: In a time where days feel like years, it’s difficult for people to build and keep a healthy routine. People are stressed and worried about getting sick, finding it increasingly difficult to separate work time from down time, so it’s hard to build a consistent routine, and they’re more likely to accomplish tasks when they’re held publicly accountable. Putting all of these together, we came up with the following problem statement:

How might we help people better build and maintain healthy routines and keep themselves accountable?

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RESEARCH & INSIGHTS

We conducted research by interviewing six different people with the goal of understanding the self-care space, what it means to them, and how they fit self-care into their daily lives.

We learned that while users thought of their self-care practice as a solitary act, they relied heavily on their community for guidance and support. We chose to hone in on the following learnings:

• Users enjoy creating unique self-care routines.

• Users feel that it’s beneficial to have a structured self-care routine to keep themselves on track.

• Users find that connecting with their community is essential to their self-care.

• Users need the ability to practice self-care in their everyday tasks.

With our learnings, we zeroed in on our target audience through our persona, Serena.

(Note: we wanted to create two different personas, one of someone who was well-versed in the different methods of self-care and one of someone who was only beginning to dip their toes into what self-care was exactly, but due to the time constraints implemented for this project, we only chose to move forward with one.)

REVISED PROBLEM STATEMENT

With a better understanding of Serena, we revised our problem statement:

Users have more difficulty maintaining their self-care routines without the support of their community.

As a result of not being able to prioritize self-care, Serena feels overwhelmed and less likely to successfully practice self-care throughout her day.

How can we help Serena get positive reinforcements to help her stay motivated to practice self-care?

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DESIGN & TESTING

To decide which features to integrate into our MVP (minimum viable product), we created a MoSCoW Map as well as a feature prioritization matrix and found that most of our “Must” features were feasible for the goal we were trying to achieve:

• Create an online community to connect with. \\ Users relied on their self-care community more than they realized.

• Create a private goal tracker. \\ Users strive to be their best selves often by setting personal goals so they can “compete” with themselves.

• Create a digital space the user can design to their liking and create their own personal goals. \\ Users liked to personalize their self-care.

• Allow users to gain points for completing self-care tasks. \\ User’s needed “me time” to be prioritized.

With that, we proceeded with a remote design studio to determine what Serena’s profile page would look like when she opened up Oasis.

After presenting our designs and iterating based on each other’s feedback, we created a mid-fi wireframe of Serena’s user profile screen:

And then we brought Oasis to life by incorporating branding that nodded to Headspace. Here are some of the features that we incorporated into our app:

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TESTING & LEARNING

To test our design’s functionality and usability, we conducted two rounds of usability testing (one mid-fi, one high-fi) with a total of twelve users who were asked to complete the follow tasks:

1. You’ve been feeling a lot of anxiety due to COVID-19, and you want to try out a new self-care app. Create a new account.

2. Congrats on joining the app! You’re feeling good, and you want to update your friends on how you’re doing today. Complete the emotional check-in.

3. You’re trying to use the app to help you consistently meditate, and you just completed your third day of meditating in a row. Update your progress.

4. You’re interested in learning new self-care tips that the self-care community finds useful. Browse the feed and like a status.

5. Maria is going through a rough patch and feeling down. Send her some words of encouragement.

In the first round of testing, users were confused after creating an account about the gamification aspect of the app, which led to confusion about how points were earned and what exactly they were for. Additionally, we heard negative feedback from multiple users that the “Leaderboard” feature, originally intended to help motivate them, could potentially causing anxiety and sadness in relation to their self-care practice.

With the resounding feedback about the Leaderboard, we went back to the drawing board; we had to pivot our entire game plan. After hours of deliberation, we came to the conclusion to provide users with a private “Points Tracker” within their profiles to allow them to track their self-care progress without comparing it to their peers’ progress.

Some other updates that we implemented based on user feedback included:

1. “Elements Shop” where users can redeem the points that they accumulated from completing various activities within the app to customize their virtual meditation space.

2. Different options to log mood: “update mood,” “update & share,” and “update later” because some users were not sure if they wanted to share their moods to their feed by default.

3. Segmented social feed to allow users to toggle between “Buddies” (friends only) or “Public” feed.

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LOOKING AHEAD

Following the second round of usability testing, there are several things to explore before finalizing and handing off the developers:

• Add more context in regards to the points system: what is it for? \\ Implement on onboarding to give users more information about the points system and what they can do with them,

• Create a way for users to send redeemed oasis elements to their buddies or members of the community. \\ Users would have more of an incentive to engage with peers and share a positive treat with their buddies.

• Explore augmented reality integration for the users’ personalized oases. \\ This would be an opportunity for users to fully immerse themselves in their digital mediation space.