Enhancing meditation discovery to support more consistent engagement with Headspace.
ROLE
PRODUCT DESIGNER & UX RESEARCHER
TEAM
HEADSPACE
YEAR
2023
What did we build?
BUILD DEEPER CONNECTIONS
Personalized routines
Build routines that seamlessly integrate into your daily life. Choose from a variety of meditation durations and exercises, and let your mindfulness practice adapt to your schedule.
MINDFULNESS PARTNER
Sunny: Your mindful guide
Simply chat with Sunny about how you're feeling, and get instant recommendations for meditation sessions that match your mood and time.
Sunny: AI buddy
Build seamless routines
What's the problem we're solving?
There is a lot of great content on Headspace for people looking to improve their well-being
Despite Headspace's clear benefits, many users struggle to make Headspace a consistent aspect of their lives and health practice
How did we figure out what to focus on?
I interviewed people with different levels of experience with Headspace to understand their needs, motivations, and frustrations with meditation. This helped uncover the deeper emotions behind their habits and guided more thoughtful design.
Affinity mapping
Common pain points…
🫥
Underutilized experiences
Users were annoyed when prompted with meditations and videos that didn't feel relevant to them on their Home.
⏭️
Abrupt transition
There was no sense of reflection or moment to pause after finishing a meditation or video.
🌀
Too many choices
For new users, it was difficult to choose a meditation because there are so many options to choose from.
The overall finding was that Headspace had an opportunity to create more personalized experiences within their product to cater to a wide range of audiences and scenarios for mental health care.
How do we strategize?
Personas
Development of 3 main personality types of Headspace users
User journey
Service blueprint of user journey and possible interventions
Hypothesis and ideas
Analysis of design ideas
ULTIMATE DESIGN GOAL
Create personalization features for Headspace users so that they can integrate mindfulness practices into their lives on a regular basis which would increase retention and content discovery
So how did I refine and make design decisions?
Editing a routine
Users should to be able to quickly change their routine on the home screen. This led me to experiment with designs that would allow them to move and delete meditations.
Interface iterations
Adding new meditations
I explored ways to respond to user action and indicate that their actions were confirmed with visual cues and motion to feel intuitive and gratifying.
Interface iterations
Meditation Routine
The challenge with Sunny was to strike a balance between playfulness and functionality and for users to feel like they are talking more humanly than to just a screen.
Interface iterations
Honing in on micro-interactions
Interfaces must be visually impactful, but motion and prototyping ultimately determine the user experience. Here I focused on changing the order of the routine.
Background color
Fade out
Border
Fade out + border
Launch