Finding Your (Digital) Oasis
Comfort in community and healthy routines during a time of social distancing
We’re currently living through an extremely challenging time with shelter-in-place orders and looming uncertainty becoming the dystopian norm. Everyone is social distancing and can only leave their place of residence for essential tasks such as grocery shopping while donning masks and gloves to ensure our safety. Even then, we have to come home, strip the clothes that we wore on the outside, and take a shower to make sure that we’re taking extra care. Anxieties and worries are high, with people’s mental health taking a toll, whether it’s being bombarded with the rising number of deaths or not being able to see friends and family with the carelessness from before March 2020.
To help increase connectivity, we created a standalone self-care social app called Oasis with the intention bringing it under the Headspace product umbrella. Users will be able use Oasis to connect with their peers as well as a public community in conjunction with the ability to track their personal goals and moods. After all, social distancing doesn’t mean that we have to be distant socially.
My Role: UX Researcher/Designer | Duration: 2 Weeks
Scope of Work
We were tasked with creating a completely new product that would complement Headspace’s current app and offerings over a two week period. Through the data we collected through the research and testing phases, we created a way for Headspace users (and their friends) to make their journey a bit more social.
Initial Problem Statement
Before we dove into our research, we came up with our hypothesis and assumptions as well as our initial problem statement. 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?
The Business Case and Opportunity
Headspace’s mission is clear—they want to improve the health and happiness of the world. Headspace was launched initially as an events company but turned into an online resource for those who wanted to experience and benefit from meditation everywhere and anywhere. As of February 2020, Headspace has a reported 62 million users with over 2 million paid subscribers.
While Headspace has some social functions, like sending pre-populated, mindful (but limited) messages to their “buddies,” the community features seem to be lacking. With the creation of our app, we’re able to bridge the gap between the sense of peace that users get from using Headspace to the connectivity to a community of like-minded individuals striving to create healthy habits. We found that apps like Goodreads provide users with a social feed that allows users to like and comment on their friends’ reading updates, which gives a traditionally solitary experience a social angle.
Leveraging their already-robust community of users, we have 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.
Goal of Research and Methodology
Before diving into actually building out our product, we conducted research by way of user interviews with the goal of understanding the self-care space, what it means to users, and how they fit self-care into their daily lives. We created a screener survey to properly vet interviewees; we wanted to speak with people were open and willing to talk about their experiences and methods of self-care. My team and I were able to interview a total of six people and gleaned many interesting insights from our conversations.
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.
Synthesizing User Interview Data
In order to visualize the data that we collected from the interviews, we created an affinity map to uncover patterns and insights:
- Users enjoy being able to both give and receive positivity.
- Mental well-being is a key motivator for users’ self-care practice
- 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.
- In addition to using social media to stay connected with their friends and family, users turn to social media for positive inspiration and to stay informed.
- Users have difficulty making time for self-care.
- Users find that connecting with their community is essential to their self-care.
- Users place high value on personal/alone time.
- Users understand the importance of meditation as a part of their self-care routine.
- Users need the ability to practice self-care in their everyday tasks.
- Users like to incorporate physical exercise into their self-care routines.
- Users find music helpful to guide their self-care routines.
During this emotionally and mentally draining time, we were grateful that so many people were open and willing to speak with us about their daily routines.
Persona and User
Taking all the great insights that we uncovered through user interviews, we created our persona, Serena, who is an embodiment of our target audience.
(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.)
Serena is a busy freelancer with a stressful job and is trying to maintain a regimented routine to help manage this stress. She loves sharing self-care tips that make her happy with friends and family and gets a boost from feeling like a positive force in the world. While she wants to be more consistent with her routine, she finds that it’s difficult to manage because of her busy schedule and is unable to prioritize self-care.
We created a user journey to fully understand a day in the life of Serena. She starts her day off feeling great because she knows she has a morning run planned; however, due to a fire alarm raised by her unhappy client, she’s unable to have her daily run, which causes her mood to dip. With her low points, Serena has positive moments throughout the day when she’s able to connect with people she cares about, like when her husband brings her breakfast and when she’s able to find some inspiring content on Instagram to share with her friends. Ultimately, Serena ends her day on a low point, because she feels exhausted and guilty from not being able to take the time to focus solely on her own self-care.
Revised Problem Statement
With Serena in mind, our revised problem state was as follows:
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?
Insights to Features
Taking the long list of insights that we uncovered from the user interviews, we decided to focus on the following four and created features to reflect our findings:
- 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.
After we gathered or features from our insights, we created a MoSCoW Map. We decided that we would have specific features that include a personal profile, direct message, self care feed, personalized “happy space”, and mood check-ins, among other features. After creating our MoSCoW map, we arranged the same features into our feature prioritization matrix. We were happy to see that most of our “Must” features from the MoSCoW map sat at the intersection of “low effort/low cost” and “essential,” which solidified the features that we would incorporate into our MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
The Competitive Landscape
After determining which features we wanted to include in our app, we conducted a feature analysis to get a better understanding of the similarities and differences that our product had compared to our competitors and comparators.
Through the analysis, we found that all competitors and comparators have the ability to customize the experience and they see this as a must-have. Additionally, we found that all direct competitors lacked the ability to share progress and send personal direct messages with friends through their existing platforms. Different from their mental well-being counterparts, physical activity-oriented apps utilized gamification as a form of increased motivation, which we found interesting.
Designing Wireframes and Usability Testing
Because of our remote situation, we conducted design studio for a user’s profile page over Slack and Zoom, which worked extremely similarly to what would have been the ideal situation; I still got to hear the scratching of my teammates’ markers and pens through the soundwaves, which was extremely gratifying.
We presented our designs to each other over screenshare and then created the first pass at Serena’s user profile page through Figma:
…And eventually got to this! Introducing… Oasis!
How’d we get to this point? Testing, iterating, some more testing and even more iterating.
Usability Testing
After determining which features were the most important for our MVP, we conducted a total of two rounds of usability testing to identify any usability issues with a total of twelve people, six for the first round and six for the second. 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 users had a lot of negative feedback that the “Leaderboard” feature, originally intended to help motivate them, could potentially causing anxiety and sadness in relation to their self-care practice. There was also some confusion about the way scenarios and tasks were worded which led to a higher difficulty rating for task 3 and 5; however we kept the same questions for the second round of usability testing so that we could accurately compare the task performance between the two rounds.
We used this usability testing script for our usability tests that were conducted over Zoom calls:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- You’re interested in learning new self-care tips that the self-care community finds useful. Browse the feed and like a status.
- Maria is going through a rough patch and feeling down. Send her some words of encouragement!
With the resounding feedback about the Leaderboard, we went straight back to the drawing board; we had to pivot our entire game plan and redesign how this was going to come to life. 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. Additionally, we created an “Elements Shop,” where users can redeem their points for completing various activities such as completing daily goals, updating their “Mood Tracker,” and interacting with members of their community. The contents of the “Elements Shop” would allow users to further customize their digital meditation spaces.
Additionally, users were split on whether or not they wanted to share their moods with their communities; to accommodate all users’ preferences, we replaced the single “Share to feed” button when a mood is updated with three options: “Update Mood,” “Update & Share,” and “Update Later.”
To further support the unique preferences of users about how they want to practice self-care, we segmented the social feed so that users can toggle between posts from users they have added as “Buddies” or “Public” posts from the entire Oasis community.
How We’ll Measure Success
To measure Oasis’ success once launched, we’ll refer to the HEART framework that we created. We measure happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success by using trackable goals, signals and metrics.
Looking Ahead
After our second round of usability testing, we want to explore the following next steps:
- Add more context in regards to the points system: what is it for? \\ We want to give users a short tutorial when they launch the app that will give them more information about what the points are there for so they have an incentive to participate and earn posts. Users found it unclear how the “Goals Tracker” should function, which would be improved by more context explaining the points system, potentially in the signup flow or on the “Goals Tracker” screen.
- 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.
- Run more usability tests to ensure that our updates are valuable and intuitive.
- 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.
Working on a team with like-minded individuals who understood the value of self-care during a time of crisis was an incredible experience, and my team worked tirelessly for two weeks to bring community and gentle self-care accountability to the palm of users’ hands.
Everyone right now is navigating the uncharted, pandemic waters; just yesterday, it was announced that the United States is the global epicenter of COVID-19. The uncertainty builds heightened anxieties as we read every media piece about the swiftly-growing crisis that we’re facing. Connectivity and practicing mindfulness with communities is becoming even more essential than ever before, and we hope that something like Oasis will help people remember to be kinder to themselves and to lean on their communities to remind them that they’re not alone in how they’re feeling.
