Project 5: Rooted Wellness Coaching

Intro
For Ironhack Project Five we were asked to create a wellness app for the National Wellness Institute.

“The National Wellness Institute is an organization founded in 1977 with the mission of providing health promotion and wellness professionals unparalleled resources and services that fuel professional and personal growth.

They offer certification and training for wellness professionals, providing them with frameworks and tools that they can use to help clients achieve their wellness goals. The company has been very successful over the years and their annual National Wellness Conference has become the most highly acclaimed professional conference in health and wellness.

Even though NWI has numerous years of experience in the wellness field, their program has been slow to catch up with technology. They have seen a substantial drop in memberships and want to find a way to add value to their members. To do this they have decided to focus two things:

Create a set of digital wellness tools for Wellness coaches

Update their image — create a new visual system that reflects their innovative and refreshed approach to wellness.”

The Challenge
The National Wellness Institute wants designers to re-imagine how people can adopt and maintain a routine that enhances their well-being.

The approach can be focused in any category that relates to personal well-being, such as (but not limited to): exercise and fitness, eating/diet, meditation, time management, etc.

The only requirement is that it tracks the user’s progress and pushes them to commit to a healthier lifestyle.

The UI should reflect a fresh, updated image of the current branding.

Meditation
For my project I decided to focus my app on meditation. Meditation is a practice that has always intrigued me personally. I have dabbled in it sparingly, but haven’t been able to really commit to a routine. Like you will find out later in this case study, like many, I struggle fitting meditation into my busy schedule. Although I know it’s the key to my mental health wellness, I just haven’t been able to make it a priority.

So, what is meditation exactly? That was one of the first questions that I asked people. I was surprised to learn that meditation means a lot of different things to different people.

But let’s just take a moment to look at the “actual” definition of meditation:

What a beautiful thing meditation is. Even just reading the definition, I feel a sense of peace and calm.

Market Research
Before I could really start thinking about what I wanted to do with my app, I needed to do some market research in order to learn about the existing competition.

Once I knew what my biggest direct competitors were Calm and Headspace, I was able to start thinking about some of the indirect competition who had apps that I found appealing, Noom and Meetup.

I loved really loved the coaching and educational component used in the Noom app and I was interested in the communal aspect brought by Meet up.

Survey Results
Simultaneously, I put together a survey of questions to send out to friends, family and social media followers. I took a good amount of time to really flush out the best questions to ask, in order to gather the most insightful quantitative data.

After 48 hours of having my survey out for the world to respond to, I received 46 responses. Not too shabby. The results I received were pretty on point with my expectations.

Here are some of my survey insights:

• 74% of my responders were female
• Mostly ages 30–44 y/o
• Only 27% of my responders had meditated before
• Of those 27%, said that meditation was just a sporadic occurrence for them.
• 55% of the meditators came to the practice to help reduce stress.
• 76% of meditators noticed a general decrease in anxiety when practicing meditation and mindfulness.
• 92% of the non-meditators say they just don’t know how to, but are willing to try.

Competitive Analysis
While my survey was doing it’s job collecting data, I started a Competitive Analysis of the main players. I analyzed their brand, features, and market position.

Brand Analysis

Feature Analysis

Market Positioning

After completing the competitive analysis I decided that I wanted to tailor my app to being somewhere in the realm of of Headspace and Noom. I found that Headspace and Noom were very similar in their approach. They were both very friendly and inviting, geared towards beginners, had an educational components, and were easy to use. I also loved that they kept their users engaged and accountable.

I was also able to deduct that coaching was a need amongst the majority of the apps I explored. So coaching would be come one of the main focus points of my app. I would also try to sprinkle in some of the other gaps in the market, but would need to develop them further at a later time. Keeping things simple would be key to completing this challenge in the 4 weeks allotted.

Interviews
After collecting and deciphering all the survey data, I put together a list of questions to use for interviews. With a bit more knowledge at my fingertips now, I was able to tailor the questions to fill in any gaps from the survey, and to dig deeper in order to fully understand how people perceive meditation and their preferred meditation outlets.

I wrote down 10–15 questions that I could ask if the interviews were not flowing easily. I didn’t number them or anything, because they would just serve as a guide. I wanted the conversations to take their natural flow.

I was able to schedule 5 interviews. I wanted to get a good mix of men and women, beginners, avid meditators, and non-meditators.

Some of my interviews were very insigtful and I was able to pull a lot of qualitative date from. Some were not. I learned a lot in the process, though. I learned that meditation means a lot of different things to different people. that people meditate for various reasons, and in various ways. And that most importantly, most of those who have discovered their favorite way of meditating, don’t want to change or try anything else. “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it?”

Here are some insights I gained:

“For me, Meditation is complete mindful relaxation.”

“…it’s definitely like a mind and soul connection which could be,
I believe, tied to spirituality. ”

“It’s like a mental workout.”

“What people get out of praying? Is what I get out of meditating.”

Affinity Map
I took the overwhelming amount of data I had collected and make my life easier my breaking it down into snippets, and then organizing them into categories. I quickly began to see trends related to perceived benefits from meditation, how people meditate, why people meditate, and how people felt about using an app to track progess.

Jobs to Be Done & Job Stories
During this stage of the boot camp we were introduced to Jobs to Be Done style interviews. Even though we were not required to conduct those type of interviews for this project, we were still asked to take our interview data and some up with some jobs to be done, or in other words, things users needed our app to accomplish for them.

This was a fairly new concept for me, but I found that users wanted to be able to improve their mental health by finding ways to manage stress and prioritize themselves, and they felt that could be accomplished with the help of a wellness coach guiding them and keeping them accountable throughout the process.

It was much easier to understand when written out as a statement using this template:

When _________ I want to _________ so I can blank _________.

Below are some examples I came up with.

Value Proposition Canvas
I needed to make sure that the “services” I was providing through my app, matched up with the needs of the users. I also needed to look at their pains and gains and make sure that they would be relieved by using my app. The best way to test this out was with the help of a handy-dandy Value Proposition Canvas. The newest tool in my toolbox.

Problem & Hypothesis
The next step in the process was to establish the problem and hypothesis statements for my app.

How Might We Statements
With a clear problem statement in place, I was then able to come up with How Might We Statements…that basically proposed ways in which to meet the needs of our users.

MOSCOW & MVP
At the introduction of our project, we were provided with “Must have’s” for our app. Those were not up to discussion and were the first additions to my MOSCOW chart. With the must haves in place, the could haves, should haves and won’t haves just easily fell into place.

Once the MOSCOW was completed I was able to identify the Minimum Viable Statement, or what my app would provide for my users, at the bare minimum.

User Persona
Our user needed a face, personality, and a name. I came with “Meditating Mindy” by a freak coincidence that happened with my TA Robert. The name stuck, it worked, and here she is.

Mindy is a busy gal, juggling school and work. She barely has time for herself, and the stress is building. Her anxiety is giving her anxiety. She needs a way to blow off some steam that will not interrupt her already jammed packed schedule. (Well it’s good thing we have Rooted coming around the corner.) ;)

User Journey Map
In order to place myself in the shoes of my user, Mindy, I needed to come up with a “journey” of her search for a meditation app. This journey would demonstrate how she found the app, started using it, and how she felt before and after the app came into her life. The journey would then help to pinpoint areas of opportunity where the greatest frustrations were, to hone in on as part of the design of my app.

Lo-fi
I put my ideas on paper and created a low-fidelity sketch of the different screens I thought my app should include. This would very soon change, once I realized that in order for Mindy to complete her journey, she would need a lot more steps in her flow. Regardless, here are the sketches I came up with.

User Flow
Now that I have a clear understanding of Mindy’s journey to wellness and the general idea of what my screens will look like, I can take the next step, creating a User Flow. Users flows are really not something I am great at yet…I either include too much or too little…in this case I think I included too many steps, but more is always better to be safe?

At least, while creating the flow, it helped me to really visualize what needed to go on each screen. This is the moment where I realize that my low-fi was too simple. Waaaayyyy too simple. So back to the drawing board I go. Well kind of. I decide to move on to the mid-fi, still carrying with me the knowledge I have gained from my lo-fi and flow.

Mid-fi
My mid-fi was probably the most time consuming part of this entire process. Just as I thought I was done with my mid-fi, I realized I was missing a step in the sequence. And I was only at the “design” portion of the mid-fi. Once I got to the prototyping and adding the flows things got more complicated. I ended up with more screens than ever before. I was sure I screwed something up along the way. Maybe I over-thought it. But I just went with my gut, and took the next step…testing.

Using Useberry, I sent out my mid-fi to some loyal friends who have been testing my prototypes all throughout the boot camp. Let’s just say I owe them big time. I was surprised with the positive feedback I got and the small changes that were suggested. For the most part, I was told that my app was easy to use and very intuitive. Phew!

Visual Competitive Analysis
Before I could move on to the Hi-fi, I first needed to add some color to my app. But in order to do that I needed to conduct a Visual Competitive Analysis of my previously determined competitors. In this visual analysis I would look at each of their apps and study their colors, layouts, fonts, and images. Basically the look and feel of each app.

Brand Attributes & Mood Board
Now that I know what the competition is doing, the good and the bad, I can start to envision the look and feel of my app. Before I start looking at imagery, I need to figure out what I want the users to feel when they look at my app. What attributes do I want to come to their mind when looking at my app.

After compiling a list of attributes, I cant start to put a mood board together. I find it easiest to create a board in Pinterest and start adding images that I think go with the look and feel of my app. Once I have a good amount of images, I start to add them to a canvas in a collage format. This process makes it easy to see pick on themes and trends throughout the board.

To make sure that other people are seeing what I am seeing, it is important to test the mood board. It doesn’t need to be anything super formal, but usually I select a random group of people from my friend circle, ask them to look at my board for a minute, and then I have them tell me the first 5 words that come to mind.

After testing my mood board, I knew that I was right on track in conveying the following attributes: calm, warm, earthy, joy, mindful, free, grounded.

Colors
As a really visual person myself, choosing colors for design is one of my favorite tasks. There are so many tools out there to help with this. Don’t get me wrong, you can get sucked into a deep dark hole of colors if you dig too deep, but it’s still fun. I always take to Kuler by Adobe. Here are some samples of my color search.

I found that these images below were the most inspirational in creating a color palette that conveyed the brand attributes I was going for.

It was easy to pick out a color grouping once I narrowed down the color search to using my inspirational pieces. There you have it. The very first color, the blue, would become my primary color, with the green and red on that same line becoming accent colors, and the bottom row becoming tertiary colors.

Typography
Normally I would say that choosing the right typography is very time consuming, with all the options out there in the world. This time, it wasn’t the case. I knew from the start that I wanted to use a clean font that was recognizable across interfaces. I work a lot with Lato in my professional life, and I have learned to love it. It is clean, readable, and has a wide family.

Logo
I couldn’t create an app and not have a logo to go with it. Logos are normally something that I struggle with. A logo carries so much responsibility. I mean, it’s the face of the brand after all. So when designing a logo, it has to be perfect.

Before I could come up with a logo, I needed a name for my app. So I started ideating by jotting down words that came to mind when thinking about meditation. I somehow arrived at “grounded.” From there my mind went to grounding and ground and then roots, and finally ROOTED. That was pretty perfect.

Immediately I started thinking of what imagery would represent “rooted.” It was easy to go the tree with huge roots route, but that has been overdone. Plus, I a m a huge plant lover, so I tried to think small scale, and came up with a little branch growing out of the ground. Paired with a rustic font, came the logo for my app.

Style Tile
Below is the style tile that encompasses pretty much all the visual attributes I have discussed in the last few sections.

Dashboard
In my mid-fi I came up with a very basic layout of what I thought my user dashboard would look like. I took that layout a step further and added a face to it. I knew that I didn’t want the dashboard to be overwhelming. Just a quick and easy to use tool to check out progress.

Then I realized that the wellness coach intro page pretty much served as a secondary dashboard, so I took that screen a step further as well. For the coach screen I wanted it to convey a welcoming and friendly voice. I wanted the user to feel supported and comfortable.

Hi-fi
The moment that I had been waiting for all project long finally arrived. It was time to take my design from Midd-fi to Hi-fi. I made this transition pretty easy on myself since I had already filled in almost all the known information into the Mid-fi, so all that was really left was adding colors and imagery.

I did a sweep through iStock and found images that fit the look and feel of my mood board and started saving them. Then I out them through illustrator and dissected them to my liking, retrofit them into my design, and voila! We have a Hi-fi that is aesthetically pleasing…you know like five hours later.

Thank you for reading through my process. I hope you enjoyed it and learned from it. I sure did. Goodnight!