Affinity mapping with I Statement
CASe STUDY
Balance App
Balance is a meditation app that allows you to meditate at your own pace. It offers personalised meditation programs based on the meditator's experience and needs.
The Problem
Balance acquired most new customers by offering year-long free trials, and they have seen a significant drop in customers continuing their subscriptions beyond the free trial. They want to look into the reason behind it.
User interview and affinity mapping
We wanted to see what the users of Balance really felt and decided to begin our interviews, our goal was to:
1. Question clients assumptions
2. Question our assumptions
3. Understand the users context and motivation to gain insight into why they may stop meditating
2. Question our assumptions
3. Understand the users context and motivation to gain insight into why they may stop meditating
We conducted six user interviews with people with meditation experiences on both apps and by themselves. The questions we asked are surrounding the pain points while they do meditation and how they feel about using technology to help them with spiritual and mental issues. The data suggested was split into two groups: experienced and novice users. However, it also suggests a clear trend that users are struggling to keep meditation a consistent habit.
We managed to gather six interviewees and arranged the insights into an affinity map using I statements to organise the data.
Competitive analysis
We compare the feature inventory of the meditation apps on the market to discover the opportunities and potential threats. We found that group meditation is not a feature on most applications, which might be an opportunity to Balance.
Insights:
When we see trends of users looking for help on keeping meditation a consistent habit, at the same time, they need help with it.
Inspired by the experienced users from user interviews, we kick off content research on the potential of group meditation.
We looked at feedback and research done on group meditation from sites like: Yoga International, Living Compassion, Meditation Dictations and My Virtual Meditation.
It came back to have a positive impact overall on the people that partook in these sessions. Being with other people helped motivate and keep people feeling connected to each other. It also helped those less experienced with meditation become more confident in it.
Persona
To help us focus on the users, we created a persona representing the target market. We constructed the persona using qualitative data from the user interviews and the quantitive data from content research. We understand the needs of Penny, who wants a consistent practice of meditation, and her needs could meet the business needs of Balance App.
Problem Statement
"Penny wants to make mediation a habit to experience the benefits of a consistent practice but finds it hard to commit."
How might we
With the problem statement of Penny we started to generate How Might We's to focus on the problem.
The main HMW we picked is:
How might we encourage Penny to be more consistent in her meditation practice.
Design Studio
Taking the problem statement, we run our design studio, using crazy-8 to propose ideas to help Penny's needs.
Time is an issue in a two-week design sprint; although we came up with 10+ ideas, we put the ideas into the impact vs. effort graph to prioritise our execution.
Sketch & 1st iteration
Using the collaborative sketches on Miro Board, we created the 1st prototype to gather initial feedback. The responses were generally positive.
We conducted usability testing with a diverse group of users, including both experienced and novice meditators. Their feedback was instrumental in identifying areas for improvement. We observed how users interacted with the group meditation feature.
1st user test link
Feedback
We see trends of usability issues, user behaviour and labelling issues on the prototype.
Final Outcome
The 2nd iteration resulted in a more feature-rich and user-centric meditation app. The introduction of group meditation, progress tracking, reminders, and improved content personalisation aimed to address the key issue of user inconsistency. Our goal was to create an app that not only facilitated meditation but also nurtured a sense of belonging and motivation within the user community.
High fidelity prototype link
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