Living Flow

UX | PRODUCT DESIGN | BRANDING

Designing a new digital product focused on mindfulness and meditation

Living Flow wanted to create a new brand and digital service to reach new segments of the mindfulness and meditation market. Because the market is already somewhat saturated, they wanted to create a new experience for people looking for more depth in their mindfulness practice. Though they had provided in-person meditation and mindfulness teachings to students for years, they needed to create a digital platform with seamless user experience to scale their offerings and amplify their impact, including:

• Free and paid course

• Directed learning based on a user’s goals

• Monthly/annual subscriptions

THE PROBLEM SPACE

Why Mindfulness?

The digital space provides a unique commercial opportunity for making meditation and mindfulness practices more accessible to the masses. Analogously, increased happiness, better focus, and improved health and relationships are some of the core benefits of meditation. According to Forbes, several scientists have proposed that the health benefits of mindfulness root from attention regulation, body awareness, change in perspective on the self and emotion regulation. Because these factors are active contributors to people's emotional and physical well-being, meditation may be the necessary apparatus for combatting the stresses of everyday life.

Growth in the Global Wellness Market

Growth within the global wellness market also provides a robust economic environment for digital mindfulness services to thrive. In 2016, the global wellness reached $3.7 trillion and is expected to accelerate by 17% in the next five years, according to a study conducted by Woman’s Marketing. However, with a growing trend of consumers valuing their health and wellness, organizations are often challenged on how to deliver innovative services that meet their unique and evolving needs. Therefore, defining Living Flow’s target customers and finding brand differentiators were vital in our strategy to create a competitive advantage.

IDENTIFYING THE TARGET MARKET

How might we utilize design principals to distinguish the brand, making it more attractive to our target market?

At the beginning of the project, the Living Flow's vision statement was to "provide personal growth and transformation offerings to a broad and diverse audience. We integrate the ancient wisdom of Buddhism with the demands of modern life." Building upon this vision statement, we conducted a Roadmapping Session to determine the business direction, key audience, and strategy for the MVP. Roadmapping sessions are a fundamental aspect of my design process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, as well as product development and strategy frameworks in a short amount of time.

ROADMAPPING SESSION

The audience focuses evolved as we identified opportunities for differentiating the brand, influencing various strategic directions in the design research phase.

Following the Roadmapping session, we determined that the audience that would provide the biggest opportunity to focus on reaching through the MVP was "emerging adults." The five features of emerging adulthood, which is also known as the phase of development between adolescence and adulthood, became important guiding design principals for creating a human-centered solution that underpinned the content strategy and UX:

• Age of identity exploration.
  Young people are deciding who they are and what they want out of work, school and love.

• Age of instability.
  The post-high school years are marked by repeated residence changes, as young people either go to college or live with friends or a romantic partner. For most, frequent moves end as families and careers are established in their 30s.

• Age of self-focus.
  Freed of the parent-and-society-directed routine of school, young people try to decide what they want to do, where they want to go and whom they want to be with - before those choices get limited by the constraints of marriage, children, and a career.

• Age of feeling in between.
  Many emerging adults say they are taking responsibility for themselves, but still do not completely feel like an adult.

• Age of possibilities.
  Optimism reigns. Most emerging adults believe they have good chances of living "better than their parents did," and even if their parents divorced, they believe they'll find a lifelong soulmate.
  
  Designing for the "emerging adult" became one of the primary design principals, so, accordingly, our team built upon this principle by identifying other brands and services that effectively reached this market.

DESIGN RESEARCH

Researching the competitive landscape, I analyzed interaction and UX patterns that would help influence designing a unique digital product experience.

Why Design Research?
Design research is a foundational part of my design process to design digital products, services, and systems that respond to human needs. I often utilize various design-research methodologies to hone in on the user experience strategy that would be most effective to accomplish site goals and user needs. One of the design research tools our team utilized for this project is the comparative assessment. The idea behind a comparative assessment is that people develop their expectations from the products and services that the key audience uses every day. In a comparative assessment, we look at products and services that customers are likely to encounter and use, although they may not necessarily be a client's direct competitors.

Moodboards
Lastly, I used mood boards as a design research tool to collect relevant examples of user experiences that related to site goals. In the early stages of building the UX and information architecture, I used these methodologies as benchmarking tools to model potential directions for the overall user experience that would be effective to employ to reach the site and user goals.

Below are a few samples we looked at during the design research phase to inform the architecture and UX. Online healthcare and patient engagement portals, how fitness apps encourage users to meet their goals, as well as how online courses guide the user through lessons and material were all sources of inspiration. 

USER SCENARIOs

Building an effective content strategy

Building off of the design and audience research, I created user scenarios and proto-personas to help focus on specific user goals and motivations that supported the overall product experience.

As part of this phase, I often apply user states, motivations, needs, and scenarios to proto-personas to begin to identify the touchpoints of the customer experience, and potential entry points to the solution we're building. Proto-personas are a modified version of personas that stimulate the same type of empathetic and user-oriented thinking, but with less investment in time. A user scenario puts a proto-persona in a situation that they would typically encounter while using whatever it is you are designing. User scenarios are a simple design framework that helps to think through the essential steps in the customer experience and unveils opportunities for how the digital product can help address interactions and touchpoints.

User Scenarios
Our team identified various proto-personas that touched on specific user needs. For example, "I'm new to meditation, and I want to try it out" (the beginner), "I'm in a tough spot, I just want something that makes me feel better right away" (the crisis), and "I'm the type of person that just wants to gain an edge" (the high-performer). We used proto-personas to reference during the creation of user/ task flows and architecture, to orient our thinking and recommendations around user needs, as well as ensure we’re designing towards their specific pain points, motivations, and experience. Typically we’ll use proto-personas as a baseline for customer segments we need to focus on for usability testing and adapted our personas based on testing and findings. For this project and because this was an “MVP," these proto-personas were more so intended to shift our team’s thinking towards an empathic strategy, rather than catalog specific characteristics based on research.

Assumptions, Shifting Focus
While initially, we anticipated that these user needs represented unique customer segments, we found that these needs instead represented various touchpoints in the customer's experience over time. Therefore, rather than treating these as distinct audiences, we used these needs as leverage points within the customer journey where Living Flow could provide value to the audience's needs.

USER FLOWS AND CONTENT STRATEGY

Architecting the user flows enabled us to map how users would complete a series of steps to reach their goals

User flow is the path taken by a prototypical user. Architecting the user flows early on enabled us to map how users would complete a series of steps to reach their goals, and also influenced the planning for building an effective content strategy. Because the digital product we were building was a paid-content platform, Living Flow needed a solid strategy and execution plan for how their content would deliver value to their end users. Utilizing the user scenarios as a baseline, we explored two different directions for the content strategy:

1. Topic-based content
   For example, lessons would be focused on "relieving stress and anxiety" or "enhancing focus."

2. Audience-based content
   For example, lessons focused on being tailored for "beginners" or "practitioners."

After exploring both avenues and how this would influence the architecture and user experience, we determined that topic-based content would be more effective because users would be more likely to select topics that they were interested in, versus identifying with a particular audience. User testing sessions validated this assumption. Additionally, the client's source content was more tailored towards individual topics, rather than a specific audience.

PROTOTYPING + USABILITY TESTING

We used rapid prototyping and created a digital prototype to test with users.

We identified two primary workflows that were key to the product's success: 1) onboarding, and 2) engaging with content. We utilized paper prototyping with index cards to create and test user interfaces quickly and cheaply. Prototyping enabled our team to lay out the information hierarchy and flow, as well as test the messaging and calls-to-action.

For user testing, we selected key moments to prototype. One of the moments that was critical to prototype was the onboarding experience. Because the onboarding experience was a key component to guide users to content that would meet their unique needs, we first tested the interfaces through paper prototypes with our internal team, both with index cards, and then creating vector screens in Sketch to then upload to Invision.

Usability Findings
Usability testing enabled us to refine and vet the key interactions for a digital prototype we tested with external user testing participants during a set of in-person moderated user testing sessions. Though this project did not include a budget for user testing, we were able to conduct a three one-hour session with participants that aligned with our target market to unveil gaps and opportunities with the UX. There were key themes that resulted from the sessions, which helped fine-tune the design principles and content strategy we used moving forward, such as the importance of conveying Living Flow's legitimacy as a brand, aligning the messaging with user's values, and providing an authentic experience that gave users an opportunity to reach their personal and professional goals.

ARcHitecture + planning

The UX aimed to offer users more depth in their mindfulness practice while helping them achieve their personal and professional goals.

Keeping the wireframes medium fidelity helped us iterate through various solutions quickly, and strip out any unnecessary steps that would create friction in the user experience.

Once the basic framework modeled the onboarding and course experience, I worked with the lead developer and project manager on our team to document the functionality that would support the best user experience. These documents were our roadmap for both the design and development phase.

UX / UI

Designing the user and brand experience

I designed a photo-centric brand experience focused on "emerging adults" in both high-performance contexts and natural environments, to achieve a contemporary spin on the desired end-state of a higher state-of-mind.

A SOLID FOUNDATION

A new brand and SaaS product

With a new brand and digital product that provides free and subscription-based content, Living Flow can deliver resources to people grappling with life’s most difficult questions and seeking self-improvement techniques. Living Flow enables users to sign up for an account and have access to hundreds of mindfulness and meditation lessons at their fingertips. As this was the product “MVP,” their team continues to evolve their lesson offerings and marketing efforts.

As the lead product and UX designer on this project, I was fortunate to have collaborated with team members such as Sean Hudson, for leading the development and technical strategy, Backpockt for leading the product management and UX support, and Jasand Pereza for development support and to help shape the experience and product strategy.