Balance
Client
Balance is new to the meditation app market and picked up attraction during the pandemic when a lot of people wanted to learn mindfulness and how to reduce anxiety.
Challenge
Balance struggles with user retention after the 1-year free trial, hindering long-term engagement. The leadership team aims to increase customer engagement and retention by exploring the provision of meditators' bioinformatics data for progress monitoring. The goal is to help users find enjoyment in tracking their mental health improvement through consistent meditation.
Solution
Focus on creating features and experiences for existing users of the app to enjoy the process of tracking their progress and in doing so develop a more consistent meditation practice.
Features include:
1. Feature cards on the Dashboard
2. Motivation and Commitment statement, easily available in the dashboard and profile page
3. Mood Tracker survey before and after every guided meditation session
4. Colorful monthly progress report
Research plan with the goals to understand:
- Why our users meditate
- What consistency looks like for our users
- What distracts them and how powerful their distractions are in keeping them from reaching their goals
- Understand how users form habits
Insights
We recruited a total of 15 participants for our user interviews, and also conducted competive and comparative analysis in parallel/
we found that:
1. Users will invest/pay for a subscription if meditation has become a habit or an activity they enjoy.
2. Most users understood the benefits of meditation but they lacked the discipline and to carve out 10 mins a day to meditate.
3. Users generally are not drawn towards using devices
worried that they’d become reliant on something to meditate, when the goal of meditating is to learn how to condition the mind without extra help (everything lies within the mind)
4. Progress in meditation is more emotionally linked
To users, success equated to a positive feeling, and reflecting holistically on how they felt, not how many sessions they completed
Persona
Looking at our research we brainstormed to create two personas, their names are Lily and Jimmy. Jimmy represents a new user who is looking to start meditation, while Lily is an ongoing user who has trouble practicing meditation regularly.
We picked Lily as a primary persona, because one of Balances’ business goals is to find what is preventing users to engage with the app and build a long-term meditation habit.
Problem statement
Lily wants to make meditation a habit so that she can reap the benefits it has on her mental health, but her busy schedule makes it hard for her to prioritize it in her daily routine. Currently, she tracks her meditation based on the positive emotions she feels after, not the amount of time or sessions she’s completed.
How Might We statement
How might we help Lily enjoy the process of tracking the improvement of her mental health through consistent meditation?
Take a look at the hi-fi prototype here.
Onboarding section
Feature cards on the Dashboard
Motivation and Commitment statement, easily available in the dashboard and profile page
Mood Tracker survey before and after every guided meditation session
Colorful monthly progress report
- Further usability testing on latest prototype
- Look into partnership and reward system
- Implementing a survey
- Better illustrations
- Animating the progress report