Mindfulearner: A Meditation App for Students

Shreya Chittem
Nov 3 · 6 min read

Wellness App Project- Ironhack UX/UI 2019

Only five days to research, ideate, and design a product!?

Ironhack’s UX/UI Design Bootcamp in Barcelona: hectic, intense, but turning out to be the best learning experience I have had yet.

Design a Wellness App

For our first individual project, our goal was to design a mobile app to support any kind of wellness (emotional, intellectual, spiritual, etc.) and improve the day-to-day lives’ of people.

As someone who practices spiritual wellness regularly, I decided to choose a wellness that I did not have much knowledge about: intellectual wellness. Interestingly enough, I noticed that they seem to go hand-in-hand with each other!

Researching Intellectual Wellness

At first, I wanted to get a more general idea of how people felt about intellectual wellness.

“How do they feel about it?” “What do they do to stay intellectually healthy?” I gathered this research by interviewing two students at a local café and sending out a survey.

During the interviews, I realized that both users mentioned that they wish they had more time to feel more educated on intellectual wellness. One user clearly said, “I don’t really have time to learn more because I spend so much time at university”.On the other hand, my survey results showed that 85% of my users were interested in learning more about self-development and 70% of my users wish to improve their intellectual health by meditating.

I knew I had to get more specific, so I narrowed down my questions a bit to focus more on self-development, mindfulness and meditation. Some responses I received were:

“I try not to be a burden on others and simply check in on myself frequently”

“Don’t have enough time to do anything because I spend too much time at college”

After surveying and interviewing students, I realized that they need a way to meditate frequently and quickly to be more mindful of themselves and others. I used this problem statement to create my app and its features.

How My Research Led Me to Mindfulearner

NOT ENOUGH TIME

The users I interviewed all mentioned that they wished they had more time to meditate. This is when I realized that they need options of quick meditations. I ranged my meditations 3–10 minutes. My app has four options to choose from: 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 7 minutes, and 10 minutes. This way, it is easy for my user to select a meditation based on how much time they have.

FREQUENCY

Mindlearner has an option to set reminders based on the user’s discretion. They would be able to have options for setting reminders on weekdays, every day, weekend only, etc. This feature is shown in my prototype for users to be able to practice mindfulness more often.

MINDFULNESS

I researched more on what mindful meditation is and found that there are four main types: Breathing Meditation, Observing-Thought Meditation, Body Scan Meditation, and Loving-Kindness Meditation. Using this information, I made it possible for students to select one of these types of meditations based on how they were feeling. I renamed the meditations as follows:

1. Breathe

2. Too Many Thoughts

3. Body Feels Stressed

4. Need Some Love

Design Based off Research

My design was meant to be simple and easy to use, so that student would be able to quickly access a meditation. My first screen asks the user “How are you feeling?” This is why I renamed the types of meditations based on how the user would feel when opening the app. The second screen asks the user “How much time do you have?” Based on these two answers, a guided meditation will be generated, where the user would be able to listen for that amount of time. The first time a user opens the app, they are gifted with a free meditation. After that, they would login and be able to set reminders for themselves from their profile page.

Digital Prototype

After multiple iterations of a paper prototypes, I designed— a meditation app for students using the design tool Sketch. To show the user flow and prototype digitally, I used a website called Marvel, in which you can animate where each button would direct you to.

You can find the digital prototype on Marvel here: https://marvelapp.com/5c31cbg.

User Testing

While testing my paper prototype, I really focused on the most important part of Mindlearner, which was to give students a quick way to meditate. I wanted to see if users responded well to the concept of the app.

The main issue they ran into was “how” they would be meditating. I decided to include a description of the type of meditation they would be doing and some context to play the video, which said “Start Being Mindful” above the play button.

Another issue was the layout of the “Set a Reminder” screen. It wasn’t clear to the users what they had to be doing. After researching similar apps and how they have this feature set up (i.e. Headspace and Calm), I finally came to a screen where it wasn’t confusing to my user anymore.

Coming Soon for Mindlearner

Since my research suggested that students wanted to be able to meditate more frequently, I thought it would be cool for them to see their progress over time. The next thing I would like to develop is a feature on the profile screen called “Calendar + History” where they would be able to see which meditation they choose over time.

While testing, my users also asked for more meditations, since they were only given four options. In the future of Mindlearner, including more meditation categories would be something I would add.

Learnings from the Wellness App Project

The biggest takeaway I had from this project was the quantity of users I had to take my survey. I was only able to get about 30 users to complete my survey, which is a very small group of users. I might have seen a different trend if there were more users who completed the survey.

Although our project was on a very tight schedule, I was able to manage my time really well. It helps me to have tasks to complete every day and know how much I need to complete in a given day. Because of how I managed my time I was able to get multiple rounds of user testing in and really use their feedback to design my app. I was also able to practice my presentation for the class (which had to be under 6 minutes, by the way 😅).

Researching intellectual wellness and designing this mobile app seemed impossible to me when the project was introduced to the class. However, I loved learning about how students react to stressful situations and what they would do to stay mindful and feel better about themselves and others. I received great feedback from my testers that they would love to use this app, which was a great motivator for me when we were on such a tight schedule 😊.

Thanks for reading!

Appendix

Survey

Presentation

Shreya Chittem

Written by

A beginner in the UX/UI field trying to figure out who she is and how to make a difference in the world

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