Headspace App Feature Redesign

Following the pandemic, mental health has become a prominent concern, and amongst the variety of methods, meditation and mindfulness have gained significance. Headspace provides relaxation and stress relief to many; however, we noticed Headspace’s functionality didn’t adequately accommodate to a variety of users.

People are having a hard time adjusting their lifestyles to implement meditation practices because they have built-in habits and presumptions.

Incorporating meditation practices to be more inclusive for users different lifestyles and their personal needs.

We focused a lot on emulating the UI of Headspace and on advanced prototyping. After multiple rounds of feedback on our designs here were the final results!

Express your emotions and feelings and reflect on the day

Built-in breathing exercises to gauge your mood and provide recommendations for your feed

Take notes on current mood and check previous moods through calendar

Provide a deeper understanding of the different breathing exercises and their impacts

More recommended techniques based on user preferences

Variety of customization options

Keeps meditation open-ended and more engaging with visuals

Filtering helps to more easily find meditations

Flexibility for in-app listening and quick time adjustments

Customizable listening settings for different learning styles and to better fit user schedules

To get a better understanding of what we would be getting ourselves into, we conducted some background research and learned that it’s difficult to put one definition to mindfulness. However, the Journal of Happiness Studies captured the essence of mindfulness, something we believe Headspace was missing. The journal describes it as:

“A practice of non-judgmental awareness of present moment experiences”

Understanding market gaps and strengths of competitors

After completing 30+ surveys and a competitior analysis of 5 platforms we were then able to highlight the key areas of our project; mood tracking, session customization, content variety, and organization.

We came up with a list of questions based upon lifestyles, preferences, mental health,and meditation. We chose to interview 20 college users, as college students are a niche microcosm of the population. We also interviews a licensed therapist to get a professional standpoint on the effects of mindfulness and meditation. After organizing our findings we found that there was no set preference or method for meditation.

We found that meditation was intimidating for college users.

Currently Headspace simply throws meditation at you to help you ‘relax’. Whereas some of our other competitors will take mood and emotions into consideration.

We received many responses related to students being dependent on their schedules and one interviewee stated that “not planning ahead can prevent maintenance of their well-being.”

We found that accounting for users learning styles and preferences can increase the efficacy of meditation.

Going back to our initial white paper research, many students felt that meditation can be unrealistic for the inexperienced.

To better understand our target audience we had to evaluate user attitudes, motivations, wants, and needs. We then created a few personas and their corresponding journey maps to better identify a typical college customers thoughts, emotions, and any areas of improvement.

Our first fictional user Azaan emphasizes that since college is a high stress environment students recognize that there is a need for mindfulness. The platform lacks personal preferences and from our findings we hypothesize that by incorporating learning styles users will be more engaged.

Our second fictional user Sarah represents a portion of the college Headspace community, she is newer to meditation which Headspace is geared towards, however, she is not confident in the platform as she can’t see the results of her progress and when she attempts to meditate in those moments of clarity she is often in a undesirable environment.

How will users interact with the new features?

From our competitive analysis and finding key areas to focus on we decided to redesign the Today and Explore pages while also creating two new features: Mood Check In and Custom Breathing Exercises. Here is a summarized version of what we created.

We started with sketches to generate ideas and brainstorm features of the app. We each completed sketches of our vision of the Today, Explore, and Description pages, as well as Check-in Flow, filtering, in-listening, and queueing. Here are a few of those sketches!

To bring our ideas to life, we started with low-fidelity grayscale wireframes, focusing on how users might navigate the platform. In our first round of usability testing, we used a think-aloud process with 20 participants, which revealed key usability pain points and opportunities to simplify interactions.

Users wanted more information on how meditation styles (e.g., breathing exercises) could meet their individual needs.

We followed up with a round of testing on our high-fidelity wireframes to evaluate the visual design and ensure consistency with the brand's identity.

We conducted substantial research at the beginning and had many ideas, making it difficult at first to synthesize things in a productive manner and prioritize the key takeaways to pursue.

Usability testing was difficult as many users got hung up on the interaction within the prototype as opposed to focusing on the UI.

In this project, we were able to build in more rounds of feedback than we had anticipated, and it definitely paid off as we had more data to back our decisions.

Being supportive while collaborating and asking many questions helped to elevate our teamwork.

I had never done proper prototyping before; however, I took this step forward to learn and explore to better see the product come to life while becoming more confident in my abilities as a designer.

I stopped shying away when confused or struggling, which provided direction and also strengthened my own creativity and ideas.