Within - Wellness App
Joséphine REMY
User Researcher
Web Designer
Product Designer
Figma
Maze
Overview 🔎
The objective was to design an application for hypersensitive people to help them track and smooth their moodiness.
PROCESS OVERVIEW
1- EMPATHIZE: Survey & Interviews, Competitors Analysis, User Pain Point, User Persona
2- DEFINE: User Journey Map, HMW Statement, Problems & Hypothesis
3- IDEATE: Site Map, User Flow, Moodboard, Style tyle
4- PROTOTYPE: Logo Design, Design System, Mid-fi prototypes
5- TEST: Testing results, Iteration & Implementation, High-fi prototype, Next steps
01: Empathize
To get a better sense on how the app could help the hypersensitive, we conducted a survey and passed it around people we thought could be categorized as hypersensitive and we also did four different interviews with two hypersensitive who have suffered from this trait of character and two psychologists.
User Persona
Like 85% of the people who answered the survey, the two interviewees had experienced in the past at least one nervous breakdown in past due to personal or professional reasons. And like a majority of the hypersensitive people, they also tend to isolate themselves: one is gardening to distress herself, the other one writes down on a journal to calm her down. As for theinterviews with the psychologists, we have learned a lot:
There is not more hypersensitive people out there but more people opening themselves to their emotions There is no way to force someone to talk about its feelings but with simple questions, they can open up more easily It’s a good thing to reflect on past emotions but one must be careful not to put too much attention on some feelings and create new negative emotions towards them The most efficient and important tool when trying to calm someone down from a nervous moment, is a breathing technique, such as cardiac coherence technique.
User Persona
02: Define
Here are Giulia’s pain points and how we intend to tackle them:
How Might We Statements
User Journey
It’s difficult to find a perfect example of how Giulia reacts and tries to get out of a difficult situation by herself. Here is one anecdote story that could be her journey and could well illustrates how she’s feeling in an overwhelming situation.
From this journey, you could well understand what she’s dealing with: her own self. So we have come up with problem statements:
We have observed that people who suffer from hypersensitivity tend to isolate or distract themselves whenever they feel overwhelmed; which is causing distress from not dealing properly and sometimes worsen the situation by postponing. We have observed that many competitors are aiming to help a very wide range of people. By focusing on one specific type of users that could benefit from the solution, we create a custom-designed solution dedicated to hypersensitive people.
And also one powerful hypothesis statement that hopefully responds to her pain points:
We believe that this app will improve hypersensitive people’s quality of life. It will help them in the short term managing their overwhelming situations and help them in the long term anticipating their emotions and motivation patterns. We will know the solution is right with a growing number of subscribers (100K in the first three years) and satisfaction feedbacks (75% positive feedbacks overall after three years of continuous improvement).
Competitors' Analysis
Thousands of applications exist on both Android and iOS, we actually had a hard time looking through all of them and choosing the most relevant ones to compare. Regarding the features we wanted to implement, here are the top competitors we selected and their features:
And from this analysis, we studied a market positioning for our own application regarding all the other competitors:
03: Ideate
Design Principles
For this application, we want to have a design that reflects a peaceful mind. We wrote 4 design principles accordingly:
Calm: The app should reflect a peaceful moment for the user. We are choosing a natural dark mode to inspire tranquility. Essential: The app is specially made for hypersensitive people. We do not want to overwhelm them with useless information. Human: The app should respect the public it is targeting. Hypersensitive people are by nature triggered by many things that should be taken into consideration. Creative: From the logo to its spirit, the app should inspire people to be creative and input data in the app just like they would in a diary.
Moodboard
To explain a little bit more what you see in the moodboard:
The night:when we think about peace and calm, we imagine an unclouded night with a full moon appearing. May it be in a city or in the wild, we breathe in the cold and feel blessed that the infinite number of stars above that makes us put our own lives into perspective.
The colors:the colors of the app are a wide range of purple and and accent yellow.“Purple represents wisdom and spirituality. Its rare and mysterious nature perhaps causes it to seem connected to the unknown, supernatural, and divine. People who prefer the color purple are thought to constantly develop themselves spiritually. They seek peace, harmony, protection, and support.”As for the opposite color yellow:“We associate yellow with warmth, sunshine, and positivity. It’s enthusiasm and enlightenment, and yellow is — in practical terms — the opposite of darkness.”
The cartoon aspect:cartoon graphics are meant to be reassuring since it takes us back to carefree times of our lives. It also reflects to a time when our imagination was endless and we could dream to grow up in a totally different society, or world, or even planet. We would make up our own rules and live in a whole happy illusion if we wanted to.
The name of the app:“Within” means “that is inside”. In this application, we want our users to reflect on what is going on inside and reassure those cutesy feelings that it’s okay they are there.
The logo:the spring is a game we used to play with when we were kids. You would put it on the floor and it would go up and down by itself while moving forward. We wanted to represent that with the W of Within. The life of a human being is the result of many up moments and down moments and is moving on on its own however you may feel right now.
Features
In order to focus on the right features, we went back and try to respond primarily to Giulia’s pain points:
04-05: Prototyping & Testing
Design System
We started a Design System right from the mid-fi wireframes in order to organize ourselves and save time when it comes to redesign the high-fi prototype later.
Mid-Fi Prototype
Here is a snapshot of my mid-fi wireframes:
We decided to test out a flow on Maze in order to verify if it was clear enough.
Here is the flow we wanted to test out: User opens app, goes to the rescue tab and calms itself with a rescue session with a breathing technique of cardiac coherence and a writing exercise.
Maze Results
User flow tested: rescue session
Flow completion rate: 100%
Misclicks rate: 16%
Clearness of flow: 8.6/10
Suggestion n°1: “The calendar is too stressful, makes me feel at work.”
Suggestion n°2: “The style of mandala is too distracting.”
Suggestion n°3: “Having so many questions on one page is overwhelming.”
We decided to implement the suggestions onto the high-fi prototype.
High-Fi Prototype
Landing page
We first started designing a landing page for desktop in order to introduce the public with our new product and explain how Within works.
Smartphone App
Testing Results
We have tested out the new prototype with the two interviewees from the user research. They were both very enthusiastic about the solution. They both thought all their pain points were well addressed. They had some very nice ideas for the next versions of the product, that would be interesting to implement after the MVP is launched.
Use responses from past rescue sessions for later rescue sessions (especially the two last questions: “What would you like to remind yourself next time you feel that way?”and “What would you tell someone who is feeling the way you did?”
Create a community of hypersensitive people to anonymously encourage others on stressful moments, since they might understand each other.
Find a way to add as many routine tasks as wanted and still be visually relevant on the mandala
Add audios, pictures and videos of cheerful moments from personal smartphone. For example: audio of my nephew saying“I love you”, video of parents saying they are proud of me, photos of my dog jumping around and sleeping. From our psychotherapist interviews, we acknowledge how important it is for one person to be encouraged by people they love.
Design a way to analyze the past emotions and rescue sessions with data visualization and progress over time.
2022
