Pitfalls in Designing for Stress— UX/UI Case Study
Products Stressed Workers Can’t Use
BRIEF
Society’s response to stress is changing. It’s indicated in more medical diagnoses and acting as a cause for a growing variety of conditions. Wellness programs in workplaces have failed to show the expected results.
With a growing opportunity space that all sectors of society are struggling to solve, I decided to start asking stressed workers a whole lot of questions. Let’s root out which de-stressing techniques work and which don’t once and for all.
TEAM
As a team of UX Design students at General Assembly, we were charged with a three week sprint in which we could blue sky our problem area.
We decided to take advantage of our surroundings — a high-stress environment of students facing new fields (software engineering, data science, product management, and user experience design), long hours, and racing deadlines with the ever-present, gnawing potential of dropping out.
Most of these students were in their late 20s and early 30s, had already embraced careers, and had left these careers behind. We were able to interview individuals who’d climbed the ladder in film production, marketing, advertising, finance, fashion, and more. They gathered from all over the map, but their breaking points were all the same.
RESEARCH
A screener survey yielded 27 replies. We selected for those who experienced stress on a daily basis, some 88% of respondents. After selecting for diversity, we interviewed 8 in detail.
We questioned them about their main causes of stress, as well as their main sources of relief. Respondents were honest, diving in depth into emotional eating and a vindictive love of violent video games.
But what united our interviewees was what sent them into a stress spiral, a self-defeating feedback loop triggered by chronic stress. By our definition, it occurred when a coping mechanism was used.
The common triggers include overwork (both in length of time spent working without a break and in workload exceeding the ability to ever enter a resting state) and lack of sleep. Other leading causes included more common triggers we all know so well — team dynamics and, of course, traffic. But there was another major recurrent cause waiting in the wings.
A major cause of stress across all interviewees: an unpredictable schedule.
What’s the big deal? Well, an unpredictable schedule:
- Is frequently caused by overwork
- Leads to lack of sleep, and
- Usually cuts off coping methods for stress (socializing with friends, exercising after work)
We’ve all spent a night working late. But we didn’t fully grasp the ripple effect — and that might cause even bigger problems with the advent of freelancing.
My team also explored physical wellness programs. Almost all interviewees had been offered a wellness program by their place of work or by their healthcare provider — these included discounts to gyms, free fitness classes, motivation for using fitness trackers, and reward programs for steps walked or pounds lost. When asked whether they had participated, a stunning 100% of our respondents said NO.
In every interview, it caused a double-take. Almost all our interviewees were a healthy weight, and enjoyed going to the gym. So what gives?
Across the board, employees want their work and their wellness kept separate.
They feared showing up at the same gym as their coworkers. They disliked being encouraged to be healthy by someone that benefits, financially, from their physical fitness. Even in their own preferred coping mechanisms for stress, they each identified individual activities, both physical and non-physical.
Let’s take a closer look at those activities.
People relieve stress by venting to friends, engaging in media (television, reading, and video games) followed by emotional eating and napping.
Physically, people preferred running (inside and outside of gyms), walking, and hiking, followed by other types of gym time (fitness classes, weight lifting).
Interviewees were aware the outdoors is pretty great, but stepped outside only by necessity (walking to work from the subway) or happenstance (noticing it was a particularly beautiful day).
They used a wide variety of apps infrequently.
More interesting than what they used was what they didn’t use. Almost every interviewee had purchased a FitBit. No interviewees still used it.
Had it broken?
No, they simply found its data uninteresting. Some enjoyed seeing their number of steps after a long day spent wandering the city simply to brag to mom, but serious physical gains were slow, and any gains, however great, always slowed to a standstill eventually. Long-term, trackers offered them no benefit. At least, no benefit with substantial, interesting changes from one day to the next.
Variable rewards are missing from fitness trackers.
But not from the Equinox app, the standout app among interviewees, and the only one used consistently. Its use reserving a spot in classes made it the head honcho of apps on our list.
The classes always changed. New classes were offered all the time. And that’s where Equinox pulled ahead of the pack, beating out FitBit, Lifetime Fitness, MyFitnessPal, C25K, and Nike Training Club.
Interested in this concept — and how it could be applied to offering users their favorite activities to relieve daily stress, whether physical or non-physical — and confident in our persona and problem statement, we got down to ideation.
That’s when everything went wrong.
DESIGN
We assembled a class-booking app for pretty much everything — you could sign up for a yoga class at a local gym, or join an outdoor activity like kayaking.
Our emphasis was on physical fitness, which serves users better in decreasing stress levels and increasing endorphins.
In paper prototyping users liked it, but feared the potential cost. Even with no price tag attached in the prototype, they wanted it to replace their gym membership, not add on to it. So as we progressed, we added booking an hour at your nearest gym.
But then everything crumbled.
We realized we weren’t actually solving our persona’s problem — her unpredictable schedule. Offering her more classes to schedule didn’t offer her flexibility, it actually decreased it — and added to the stress associated with a surprise late night at work. Now she’d booked a class she couldn’t attend.
We weren’t alone in our mistake.
Groups like MeetUp, WeWork, Equinox, and Lifetime Fitness are not aiming for stressed out, overworked individuals, but with the advent of freelancing they should be.
More work is going remote, most work is shifting to part-time or freelance (with nearly 50% of millennials already freelancing), meaning we’re all facing a brand new ballgame.
When freelancers aren’t working, they’re pursuing more work. Anything else means they don’t make rent. It’s high pressure, high stakes, every single day. Where can wellness fit in?
Okay, so if we can’t offer scheduled classes, what can we do?
REDESIGN
We circled back to our persona’s core problem — flexibility.
I pitched a method closer to WeWork’s always-available office space. Maybe we offer classes with rotating instructors, so they’re available all day long, or during certain major windows like before and after work. If users sign up for 1+ of these per week, they can simply drop in as their schedule allows.
This still has users investing in the activity via an RSVP (or a paid membership) so they’re more likely to show up.
But this doesn’t cater to cramped schedules with short time allotments, or to low energy levels. Teammates also pointed out that it damaged the real route to long-term health — forming a healthy daily habit. You can make a gym 24 hours, but how much does that really impact gym attendance?
Next I offered up a daily stress ball concept, which let the user open an app with a break suggestion. It could be a few minutes of stretches, guided meditation, breathing techniques, etc. If the user didn’t like the suggestion, they could swipe right for a new one.
We could inform these exercises with top stress research, and use the data from which were most used to further inform our understanding of stress. Moreover, the break suggestions changed on a daily basis, offering our users variable rewards.
I love the concept of ever-changing exercise methods catered to your goal. Between my background in animal behavior and my time volunteering as a puppy raiser for service dog organization Canine Companions for Independence, I’ve learned a few things.
Triggering the correct behavior-response pattern is as individual as the user themselves.
In training dogs, a dog could get “sit” with the first training method you tried… or not. If the puppy doesn’t understand, it’s your job as a trainer to progress through different training methods until the concept clicked — from the method that worked for 50% of pups to the method that worked for 20% to 10% to purely experimental methods.
What this means for offering users ever-changing suggestions for alleviating stress is that we’re increasing the likelihood that something will click — permanently. This means our users will find a method that works for them in perpetuity.
With this, we had a plan: Refresh bloomed into being as a de-stressing break suggestion app.
Team members added even more fuel to the fire, showing how important affirmations were to our interviewees to add a post-exercise affirmation page.
Concerned about accessibility (and how some users loathe certain de-stressing techniques) I added in a “don’t show this again” button at the base of the suggestion page so that users could skip all suggestions categorically based on their preference.
Team members pointed out that users often forgot to give themselves a break, and added in notifications to remind them. Notifications, when pressed, led to the suggestions page. Notifications could be turned off or set for specific days and time periods in the settings page.
Mid-fi tested well, with 100% success from our 3 usability tests when users were tasked with choosing their settings and offered their first break reminder and break exercise suggestion.
One user found the suggestion page too busy for an app that should be calming and minimalist, so we deleted the text walkthrough and enabled a visual toggle to let users see their exercise step-by-step.
In high-fi testing, users again succeeded at the task in 100% of our 3 usability tests.
One user wanted to end the randomization of suggestions, and rather than swipe for a new one he wanted to see a list of them. The team liked the concept, and a homepage was added that showed exercises by type and length of time from start to completion. Click the logo, find the homepage, and select your own exercises. The more users look through the app, the more they’ll find waiting for them.
RESULTS
By exploring work stress as an opportunity space, we made a common mistake: instead of sitting down with our persona’s unfulfilled needs, we imitated the best product on the market.
We explored the best available instead of what was needed.
Once we realized our mistake, we went back to our research. Our stressed interviewees needed immense flexibility, followed by variable rewards, and then by affirmations.
By stepping outside a pre-defined problem area, we found a solution that cost our users less time, less money, and yet offered them more than ever before.
