MindGarden

Simple Meditation that sticks.
What is Mindgarden?:
MindGarden is an app that turns consistent meditation into a beautiful garden. This app encourages people to make meditating a habit.
Team: 1 Illustrator 1 Developer 1 Marketer 1 Video Editor 1 UX Designer and the CEO
My Role: Lead UX Designer
Duration: May 2021 - Present

Project Overview:

Problem:
Many people hear about all the benefits that meditation can provide and the number of people who meditate have more than tripled since 2012. Yet many people struggle to consistently meditate and give up before any they see any of the benefits.
Solution:
We wanted the app to be fun and colorful to reflect typical games we see. The main solution was to show beginners exactly what to do. We hope helping our users ease into meditation will help them consistently meditate.

Double Diamond Model of Design

Problem

"How do we get GenZ to consistently meditate?"

What do we need to change?[Discover]

original app:

The problem with the current app was it was not effective in getting our target audience to start meditating and continue meditating.

Discover

Online Research

We decided to spend the time to research GenZ. We found that Gen Z is a marketable generation but their attention span may challenge brands since ...

"the average attention span of someone born into Gen Z is about 8 seconds"

This was surprising since if we look at GenZ and connection with video games looking at this diagram made by Newzoo on Medium we can see that GenZ spends a good chunk of their time playing video games.

Discover

Competitive Analysis

In the past we looked at different meditation apps instead we decided to take a look at other places that attract the Gen Z audience
•When thinking about GenZ super popular to this generation is the idea of Influencers. Currently Emma Chamberlain has one of the biggest impacts among the Gen Z audience and she also has her own company.
•Chamberlain Coffee: They have a very youthful and fun vibe and fun characters that tie to the brands identity.
•We also looked at video games since we are pitching the idea of a gamified version of meditation.
•We looked at the iconic Mario Games and also viral apps such as candy crush.
•When looking at these apps and look at our current app we saw how bright and playful these games were.

Discover

Research Study

•We decided if we be a good idea to ask people to use the product first hand and see what users said about the product. So we recruited 3 people among the generationZ who have never meditated before to use our app and tole them to use the app for a week.
We asked users to:
"Take the time to use the app as new users and write down everything whether it is positive or negative. There is no right answers the more you write the better. This study is made for people who have never meditated so no worries if you find it difficult to keep up with the meditations."
•We then at the end of the study took the time to interview each users after looking at notes they have taken.

What do we need to focus on?[Explore/Define]

Explore/Define

Affinity Diagram and brainstorm session

We decided to create an affinity diagram using the interviews and other research.
Quotes from the interviews:
•"I found it super difficult to meditate everyday"
•"The 10 minute meditation was too long for me since I have never meditated"
•"I was not sure what to do everyday"
•"I liked the overall concept of the app but I am not sure it is for me since I can not stay focused enough to do meditations"
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Key features we needed to focus on:
•Creating an onboarding feature
•helping user ease into mediation
•making the home page a checklist for users
•adding text for the nav bar and to the calendar
•making everything more fun and colorful
•creating a brand identity

Explore/Define

Persona

We wanted to better understand the type of user we wanted to attract and so I took the time to create persons. This allowed the users to come to life and help us try to step into their shoes to better understand  their needs, experiences, behaviors and goals

3 Major Feature Designs [Develop]

Develop

New Designs, Preference Testing

We posted a survey for people in Gen Z and asked them choose between 2 designs and among 23 participants this was the results.

Develop

Home page Redesign

•It is always hardest to start something new, especially when you do not know where to start.

To fix this we made the home page look like a check list, this allows users to see what to do and what they still need to do.

•We also have personalized the meditation they are recommended for the day based on the questions they answered when they made their account

Develop

Breathwork

•A big problem we found in our intial interviews was that users could not sit still for 10 minutes

We developed a breathwork page that rewards users for just doing 30 seconds on a breathing exercise.

• The app relies on consistency so even doing a 1 min exercise a day could help our users
• We are hoping that once users get the hang of this they can also start diving into other meditations

Develop

On Boarding

•We realized that we had implemented all of these features but users may not realize that they are available.
•"I did not realize that the garden was also a calendar, it does not feel very intuitive to click on each of the plants"

To fix this issue we realized we needed to implement an onboarding experience for users to walk them through all the features the app has to offer.

•Using the characters that we have created to add to our brands identity we were able to make the onboarding more interactive and fun.

Develop

Current Final Redesign:
download the app in the app store!

Reflect and Grow

Reflect and Grow

Reflect

Looking back at the new redesign I think I have learned a lot. When I first did the initial designs I had not taken any design classes and now using what I have learned I feel very proud of our newest edition. Especially as the Mindgarden team has grown, it is great to have so many people to bounce ideas off of. Although this new edition has targeted many issues we had before, I know there is still a lot of room to grow and learn.

Because of this project, we realized how important it is to truly look into who we are trying to target.

Reflect and Grow

If I had more time, here is what I wished I could have done.

•More user research, I feel 3 people was all we could afford to do at the time. In the future I hope we could recruit more people for future redesigns.
•Testing the designs on users before we released due to the limited time we have as a start up we did not have time to continually do testing after we did our final solutions. (Although we were able to get the feedback from friend we understand this is not the best representation.)

Reflect and Grow

Deliver and Listen

So now that we have laid out the ground work for the double diamond process I feel we still need to continue to listen to feedback. I feel as a smaller company it would a good idea to release the app although we have not fully tested every new feature. We hope that our small audience can continue to give us great feedback so we can tweak parts of the app as we as a company continue to grow.

Just as we have done with this current redesign we hope to continue to listen to users' feedback on the app and keep iterating on our designs

Made With ❤️ & ☕️ by Sein Kim