Do Breathe Client project
By: Jack Mahon
Tags: Mindfulness, UX Design, UI Design, Mobile Apps, Mobile App Development

Overview

The client ‘Do Breathe’ asked us to help design their application, currently in its beta testing phase. The app is designed to help people control their breathing, and find peace in stressful situations. We were tasked with improving engagement and retention, and improving the overall experience for users, as well as the onboarding process for first time visitors.

This was the final project of my immersive UX design course with General Assembly. We were a team of three UX designers, and we had 2 weeks to accomplish the task.

We followed a Double diamond design process which is an iterative method of working. It’s made up of 4 stages; Discovery, Define, Design, Develop.

Discover

Usability testing

Our First task involved getting to grips with the product itself. We conducted a series of internal usability tests on the beta application in order to gain a greater understanding of how the experience looked and felt. We then opened the testing up to a handful of nominated users, and by doing so we uncovered a number of pain points/ areas that needed working on.

It was really interesting to see that users were generally aligned in the feedback they provided, below are three examples of important findings that we gathered in this stage of the process.

Usability test on existing app

3 main callouts from testing sessions;

Sign up is compulsory and happens before any explanation. No numerical value for HR & no explanation as to why it’s being measured. Limited value from summary page data — doesn’t provide performance information the user wants to see.

Competitor analysis

We kicked off our 2 week sprint by conducting an analysis of the competition, in order to identify any trends or expectations within the mindfulness and wellbeing sector.

We reviewed 8 competitors in total, 6 of which had been pre defined by the client as businesses that we should be looking at. We used a method called ‘feature comparison’ to help us decide what competitors were doing well, and what they weren’t doing so well.

We quickly realised that there were a number of features missing from Do Breathe that were present across these products. Chief amongst these were:

A clear and informative onboarding

Intuitive navigation

A relevant progress dashboard to keep users informed and engaged

Screener surveys / User interviews

Now that we had a better understanding of the market, we wanted to speak to potential users to find out what their expectations would be from an application of this nature. In order to ensure that we would be interviewing the right people we drafted a screener survey.

We collected 61 survey responses in total, and quickly recognised that there were some trends emerging.

Trends from survey responses

65% wanted clear and informative instructions on how and why they should use the app

60% said they would need clear and engaging content to keep them coming back

55% said they would need an engaging way to track their progress

We wanted to dig a little deeper. We decided to conduct follow up interviews with 11/61 people. (It’s worth noting that we would have interviewed more if it weren’t for the time constraints)

The results of these conversations were really insightful. We got loads of rich feedback, too much to analyse at face value. To help make everything more digestible, we used a technique called ‘Affinity mapping’. As the three of us were working remotely we set up a collaborative space in ‘Miro’ to enable us to complete this task, and others like it, as a team.

Below are the results of the overarching themes that emerged from our user interview affinity mapping session:

Interview Insights