Oasis
Role: UX/UI Designer
Length of the project: 2 weeks
Tools used: Figma
Overview
I worked with a team of 3 UX Designers to research, ideate and create a new space for users to focus on building a consistent self-care practice (like meditation). As users track progress towards their self-care goals, they can unlock and customize digital Oasis spaces to enjoy and share with friends.
The Challenge
The directive for this project was to create an iOS app as a brand partner to the Headspace app. Headspace’s mission “to improve the health and happiness of the world” and illustration style served as core inspiration. The end-to-end design process including user interviews, UI design, and two rounds of remote user testing needed to be completed within a 2 week timeline.
My Design Process
Research • Understand • Translate • Craft • Test • Iterate
The Solution
Introducing — Oasis: an iOS app companion to Headspace.
Oasis helps motivate people to regularly practice the self-care routine of their choice through personalized goal-setting, interactive reminders, and gamification.
As they complete goals and share progress with friends, they can unlock new flowers, cacti and other surprises to add to their digital relaxation space. Users can enter their Oasis space to take a break and watch calming and gentle animations, the perfect companion to a quick breathing exercise or meditation session.
Background & Context
Before we ideated our designs we conducted quantitative user interviews to gain insight into common self care practices and how people weave them into their day.
Key Insights
People rely on the support of their self-care community more than they realize
Self-care is intimate and personalized
People strive to be their best selves, and enjoy “competing” against themselves by setting personal goals
We paired these insights with our analysis of the competitive landscape and realized there was an ideal market gap. Because self-care apps are so personal, most do not have a social element; even though our interviewees stated that social support actually helped motivate them to practice self-care more regularly.
As a result, our design strategy became focused on:
• Personalization • Interaction • Community •
Understanding our Users
Distilling our user interview data allowed us to identify and visualize the voice of our persona, Serena, to guide our design decisions. We were now set to help ease her struggle to regularly practice self-care.
Serena, the Self-Care Maven
Goals:
Build a daily meditation habit
Share positivity with her community
Find new methods of self-care that fit her routine
Needs:
Ability to have personal time/space
Motivation to maintain her routine
Pain Points:
Busy schedule
Struggles with lack of motivation
The Problem
How can we help Serena get positive reinforcements to help her stay motivated to practice self-care?
Testing
We conducted two rounds of usability testing over remote screensharing sessions and learned that the gamification aspect needed more guidance to keep users from getting confused (this was a hint of the deeper issues we realized upon reflection). Most interestingly, we also learned that we had implemented one aspect of the game in a way that rubbed some users the wrong way.
Key Insights
Users were unsure exactly how and why points were earned
It was unclear whether sharing in the app was successful or not
The leaderboard evoked negative feelings because it framed self-care as a competition
Iteration
“Self-care shouldn’t be a competition”
The most dramatic change we made was removing the public leaderboard and redesigning the points system as a personal points tracker, which a user can choose to share or keep private.
The ability to choose between keeping progress personal or public became a key enhancement we applied to as many features as possible to meet the varied needs of our users.
Reflection
Because our team was so personally passionate about the app concept, and our vision for all of the things it could do, we initially focused on too many differing features than could effectively be designed in such a short time-span. As a result, the purpose of the app was difficult for users to describe, a sure sign that UX improvements are needed.
In the future, we will look out for this while locking down our user persona, and more effectively explore the potential for multiple personas. Refining our persona into two distinct personas could have helped us identify and prioritize goals for different users, rather than trying to combine them into one user persona and aiming to serve too many loosely connected user goals at once.
