Lounge — Designing
a wellness app for stressed millennials
UX RESEARCH ✦ UI DESIGN ✦ BRANDING ✦ STUDENT GROUP PROJECT
🕑 DURATION: 9 DAYS
PROJECT OVERVIEW
(TL;DR)
❌ PROBLEM ❌
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Millenials are the most stressed generation of our current times.
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Half of the people we surveyed (114 participants) didn't even know where to start when dealing with their stress /anxiety issues. The other half were people who knew how to manage their stress levels but needed a way to track their progress.
🧩 SOLUTION 🧩
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We created a soothing app with relaxing visuals and customisable content depending on your daily mood, with the goal of making people feel as if it were their own relaxing corner to unwind.
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End users can track their progress regarding mood, water consumption and other factors in the app.
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Breathing techniques, meditations, relaxing visuals, music, a journaling feature and a send a letter for future self option are among the activities.
🚷 BLOCKERS 🚷
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People don't rely on wellness apps to disconnect often. They would rather put their phones aside and do another activity or ignore the problem until it goes away.
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Push notifications are a dangerous area when it comes to wellness apps, they can make people feel guilty about not following up with healthy habits/goals.
The Daily Health Conference decided to host a contest and unveil a series of digital wellness apps of their choosing at their annual flagship conference in San Francisco. Knowing this, our team and I decided that we would focus on creating an app for stress relief/management.
LET'S TALK ABOUT THE ISSUE: STRESS
Stress is defined as a mental or physical response to an external disturbance such as a challenge or demand, and it has a big impact on our general wellbeing if not treated. Irritability, insomnia, anxiety, burnout and depression are among the most common manifestations of stress.
RESEARCH
Research about the market
Research about competitors
Research about stress
Research about the market
MAKING A BLUEPRINT FOR THE MVP WITH LEAN UX
📌 Our challenge: provide people with tools and resources to relax and reduce stress levels in their everyday lives and help them overcome the “coldness” of a digital environment.
💫 Aspirations: providing a tool that helps people to relax and hopefully help them create new healthy habits.
👥 Users: millennials (of any gender).
🔍 Hypotheses: we believe that the frequent usage and tracking of the app can be achieved if the users attain mental stability through meditation, breathing techniques and progress tracking.
✅ Priorities: getting to know what people think through a survey, interviews, concept testing, ideation, prototyping, usability and desirability testing.
LEARNING ABOUT THE CONDUCT OF PEOPLE
SURVEY
📋 114 people
(all genders)
84% millennials
16% other age groups
KEY FINDINGS
👥 The majority of people were employed and between the ages of 25–35.
🌋 49% of the people chose “stress or anxiety” as the most prevalent emotion in their past week.
🚧 36% of the subjects tend to ignore their stress and 24% would like to take action but are not sure what to do.
🧘♀️ Just 20% of the people take immediate action.
🍃 Music, breathing techniques and meditation were among the favourite stress relieving techniques (in that order).
🕗 People prefer to spend between 5–15 minutes on stress relieving activities.
🪷 30% of people replied yes to using an app as a stress relieving tool or method.
INTERVIEWS
CRITERIA
👥 5 millennials
(all genders)
✅ Interested in improving their mental health
❤️🩹 Have knowledge
of stress relieving methods
KEY TAKEAWAYS
🔵 All of them had felt anxious or stressed in the past week
USER: "My prominent emotions lately are anxiety and stress"
🔵 What works best for most is to have a routine with fixed habits
USER: "I've tried many techniques. the best one is to have a daily routine"
USER: "Everything about mindfulness, meditation, sleeping habits, are helping me to relax"
USER: “I don’t really feel motivated, I’ve just created the habit and became part of my routine”
🔵 Being able to track their progress would encourage them
USER: "I would like to see after one month an overview of how you are feeling and how my mood improved, to see the progress"
USER: "I'd like to have an app that allows me to set up goals"
USER: "I would like to see an app that tracks my mood. Something like a journal, how I'm feeling at every moment"
🔵 A wide range of resources is a must
USER: “To achieve awareness there are many different methods but the secret is to really repeat them, and what’s working on yourself.”
USER: “Find your own coping mechanism”
USER: “I do activities that make me feel good and that I like.”
USER: “To make me want to download an app, it should show articles informing about the topic.”
🔵 Convenience and investing little time helps build routine
USER: “I do short meditations while on the tram or bus.”
USER: “I meditate regularly in the mornings.”
THE JOURNEY OF THE STRESSED MILLENIAL
Meet our user persona: Anxious Antoine, he is a UX/UI designer living in Brussels. He’s always very busy and has troubles finding time for himself. He has tried meditation and mental health apps but didn’t get engaged. However, he’s in need of creating a routine and cultivating healthier habits.
Working Millennials need a support system to rely on in stressful times because they want to prevent anxiety and have a better quality of life.
IDEATION
Crazy 8's
OUR IDEAS AFTER CRAZY 8'S
🔵 Daily mood/goals selector
🔵 Calendar showing completed activities
🔵 Send a letter for future self
🔵 Journaling
🔵 Community/chats
🔵 List of relaxing activities under X minutes
🔵 Find your therapist
🔵 User stories
🔵 Articles
MVP MUST HAVES
✅ Daily mood/goals selector
✅ Customisable goals
✅ Progress tracking with dashboard
✅ Short exercises and techniques (journaling, meditation, breathing...) 5 - 15 min
✅ Send a message to future self
✅ Relaxing music
✅ Educational content
LOW-FIDELITY
WIREFRAMES & CONCEPT TESTING
TESTING CRITERIA
👥 3 millennials
(all genders)
✅ Interested in improving their mental health
❤️🩹 Have knowledge
of stress relieving methods
KEY TAKEAWAYS
🔵 People tend to be sceptical about the use of wellness apps and their effectiveness to reduce/manage stress unless it's developed with the help of professionals
USER: "It should be developed with professionals and entirely be based on research"
🔵 A wide range of exercises should be on rotation in order to keep the practice away from monotony
USER: "I would like to see the suggestion of more techniques, so to keep it exciting"
🔵 The 'Message for future self' was an appealing idea for all interviewees
USER: "I would imagine using the “message for future self” when I complete a task"
🔵 Push notifications are welcome if they are constructive and not
too aggressive
"I would like to be reminded to do meditation"
MID-FIDELITY WIREFRAMES & USABILITY TESTING
TESTING CRITERIA
👥 5 millennials
(all genders)
❤️🩹 Interested in improving their mental health
🧘♀️ Have knowledge
of stress relieving methods
LEGEND
⛔️ Negative
🟡 Neutral
✅ Positive
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⛔️ Tell us what you need screen: 'Get distracted' phrase has a negative connotation
⛔️ Homepage:
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Capital letters can seem intimidating in this context
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Some sections feel a bit wordy
⛔️ Exercise page: time bar is confused with a volume bar (add numbers)
🟡 Mood selector screen: repositioning the positive emojis first
🟡 Journal: users need to be able to also upload a picture of their own physical journal
🟡 Overall: elements like icons and bars were too small, some texts needed rewording to make it more concise
✅ Time management: people liked having the option to select how much time they wanted to invest in their exercises
VISUAL COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Before using all this information to build up our high-fis, we also had to study the visuals of the competition. Apps like Headspace, Calm, Balance and Happify are well established among wellness. Some of them use colder colors and others go for a more colorful palette, some use illustrations and some others rely more on high resolution pictures. One thing they all had in common is that they use sans serif fonts.
MOODBOARD
We went for a pastel color palette for Lounge, to appear light and portray sensibility, and we created gradient combinations to use throughout the app. The fonts we chose were Fraunces as a primary font for important section titles and Epilogue for bodytext, secondary headlines and buttons.
For icons we wanted simplicity, so we chose light single line icons. For mood trackers and other elements we went for emojis, which are widely used and popular among millennials.
HIGH-FIDELITY
PROTOTYPE
AN APP THAT
FEELS LIKE YOUR
PERSONAL OASIS
We performed desirability testing on 5 individuals to know whether people enjoyed the aesthetics of Lounge.
There were some comments about minor details regarding the sizing of the text and colours, however, people seemed to enjoy the experience overall. Here are some of the highlights from the tests:
Highlights
✳ "It feels like being in my little corner, it feels as if the app is there for me"
✳ "I like the encouraging messages"
✳ "The colour dots in the calendar are a little bit hard to get used to"
✳ "I like a lot the colours and how they blend, it's a
good match"
✳ "It's very calming"
✳ "Some text looks a bit too small to read"
Desirability testing gave us enough feedback to help us improve our existing design and make iterations. You can see some examples of elements that changed in the following visual:
LEARNINGS
During this project, we learned about:
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How to conduct a strategy to help us work on a design solution.
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Build surveys in order to get even more insights.
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Incorporate qualitative and quantitative analysis in our projects.
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Iterate, iterate, iterate!!! Iterations are never ending.
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How to work with micro interactions to make interfaces even more attractive.
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Consider accessibility in order to create holistic designs.
