Platform:
iOS / Android
Role:
UX/UI Designer
The Challenge
A task for this project was to analyze an already existing and highly adopted app and incorporate a new feature into the existing product. The feature we develop will be based on an area of functionality to be explored and user research. My group was supposed to work with the application Calm and add an extra section on nutritional tips, that are connected with body regeneration staying calm & focused.
Project overview
Calm is a mindfulness app for both newcomers and meditation pros. It has over 1 million paying subscribers and over 40 million downloads. Calm is also an nr. 1 in their market segment. The application consists of several features to improve its user's health and happiness, like Guided meditations, Narrated Sleep Stories, Masterclasses, Mood tracker, Breathing Exercises, Music. The great success of Calm is also due to their collaboration with world-class stars such as Matthew McConaughey, Idris Elba, Laura Dern, Kate Winslet, Lucy Liu and James LeBron.
This project was done with three colleagues of mine, Jill Zepp, Aline de Barros and Emanuele del Prete during a four-day sprint at Ironhack BootCamp. We have followed each step of the Design Thinking Process to better understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.
Empathize
The user
In order to create a product that meets the real user's needs, we decided to create an online survey and conduct in-person interviews. Very soon we have discovered, that our interviewees are interested in the specific qualities and effects of food on well-being, but they are very busy and have trouble integrating quality food into their daily life. A few were aware of how some food makes them feel and described their relationship with food as complicated.
“When I’m sick I look for food remedies and try to help my body by eating the right food.”
“When I’m happy I eat pizza, or I am happy because I eat pizza.”
“You are what you eat and this also includes your mind.”
Our online survey was filled by 15 participants, mostly women between 26 and 30 years old. 87% of them answered that food is rather important to them. 73.3% choose food based on taste preference, 53.3% based on nutritional value and 46.7% based on easiness of preparation. Only 33% described their relationship to food as “mindful” and just 27% pay attention to their body’s needs. 60% would like to have a more mindful approach to food and 40% choose food based on their emotional cravings.
In-depth analysis of collected data helped us to create our User Persona. Emma represents the different user types that may use a nutrition feature to achieve a given state of mind. Emma is a 36 years old Supply Chain Manager living in Berlin. She tries to pay a lot of attention to what she eats but has difficulties integrating food into her busy day.
We compiled a series of Emma's actions into a timeline aligned with her thought and frustrations during each phase. This gave us an insight into the design opportunities. A current journey map presents how Emma tries to unwind after a stressful day at work.
Subject Matter Expert
After conducting user research, I got in touch with a friend of mine who is a dietician with seven years of professional experience. Ewelina was happy to share her knowledge of dietetics and validated the information we had gathered during our user research. She has confirmed, that people do not know how much impact food has on their wellbeing and have a bad relationship with food. In her opinion, wide access to information provided by the internet is both a blessing and a curse. There are many products that can help us to feel better, but also many that we should definitely avoid. Her expert knowledge was a key to determinate the content of our new feature
Define
Problem Statement
We have observed, that Calm does not include information on the impact of food on well-being, which leads users to look for other apps or sources of information.
How might we help the user learn which food has which effect on their body and their mind?
Hypothesis Statement
We believe integrating an informative nutrition feature will compliment the business goals of helping people “live mindfully, sleep better and breathe deeper”. We will know we are right/ wrong through qualitative and quantitative feedback from users.
Ideate
An intensive brainstorming session resulted in many interesting ideas from each of the group members. We decided to use dot-voting in order to select the ideas that can contribute most to solving users' problems. We used a MoSCoW method to prioritize the features user might need versus the ones that are not necessary to implement. A new feature called Calm nutrition will be divided into other categories like Happiness, Relaxation, Concentration, Energy and Hormonal Balance. In each of these categories, there will be a list of products that have a positive effect on self-esteem and increase the hormones responsible for well-being. A page with the specific product will consist of a brief history, explanation of effects and benefits, information about the nutritional values and appropriate dosage.
We have drawn down the existing site map of the app and decided to add our new feature to "More" section. Our user flow is very simple and shows the happy path, that Emma would take to access information about the food she needs to relax.
Prototype and Test
We used pen and paper to sketch low-fidelity wireframes to choose the best possible solutions for our project. When we agreed on the layout and the content, we jumped into Figma and designed a mid-fidelity prototype, which we tested on Maze and with real users. For many users, the "More" section on the navbar, marked with a magnifying glass icon usually called "Search options" was very misleading. We have learned, that the feature could already be showcased on the landing screen for higher visibility.
After implementing changes to our mid-fi prototype, we ran another test in the Maze and received a result with a 100% success rate. We transferred all our findings into creating a high-fidelity prototype while maintaining the color and design style of the app and creating the content together with our nutritionist.
Interested in learning more about my work? Drop me a line!
