DURATION
Feb 2024 - Current
Ongoing
TOOLS AND SKILLS
UX Research, UI/UX Design, Google Forms, Figma, FigJam, Communication, Prototyping, Wireframing
I am a junior product designer in UC Berkeley’s UX design organization, UX at Berkeley. I am working on a client project with a team of five fellow UI/UX Designers. We talked with our client, the owner of a local coffee shop called Mind Coffee, and one thing she is passionate about is bringing more mindfulness resources to the community, while promoting her cafe. The reason for that is because her father passed away with Alzheimer's disease and she was in dire need of mental health resources but had no luck finding any. So, upon her request, we are creating a user-centered mobile app to provide mindfulness student resources to Mind Coffee customers and the larger Berkeley community through detailed, comprehensive user research, prototyping, and collaboration.
Through this project, my team and I are exploring the mental health of the community and what needs there might be because the business wants to provide that and bring more engagement to their business. This is where I improve my UX Research and UI/UX Design skills by gathering and analyzing user surveys and in-depth user interviews, as well as designing and implementing features to meet the client's needs.
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​Features include:
- Mood Tracker to bring awareness to the user's feelings
- Guided Meditation Page to learn and practice meditation
- Social Page to view and check in with your friends' daily moods
- Daily Coffee feature and inspirational quote on the home page to inspire users and promote the cafe!
THE PROBLEM
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There are very limited mental health resources for students. Students do not know where to go when they need to seek mental health help.​
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How might we integrate mindfulness practices into daily activities such as coffee/tea-drinking?
THE SOLUTION
Design a mobile app that presents opportunities for the user to become more self-aware and practice mindfulness, while promoting Mind Coffee's drinks.
RESEARCH PREVIEW (FULL CASE STUDY COMING SOON!)
GENERATIVE USER RESEARCH
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USER SURVEYS
My team and I collaborated and created a user survey through Google Forms. We recruited UC Berkeley students to complete this survey because that is Mind Coffee's largest customer group and largest student population in Berkeley. Due to this, we were able to assume that the users are mostly stressed because they are college students. We decided to conduct this initial survey to obtain quantitative data, so we asked questions that would give us numbers that helped us understand general experience and levels of exposure/knowledge to mindfulness. For example, "Have you ever tried a mindfulness app?" ​
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KEY INSIGHTS - SURVEYS
My team and I set out to understand how much users are currently practicing mindfulness. Upon analyzing the percentages and pie charts of whether people use mindfulness apps, are familiar with mindfulness, and have tried mindfulness apps, we have concluded: that there is a split group of users between people who practice and don’t practice mindfulness.
TOP FEATURE REQUESTS
We analyzed competitors to brainstorm and list out some possible app features. From this bar chart, my team and I aimed to gauge people's interests in the types of features we could incorporate into our mobile app. I concluded that having gift-giving features among friends and guided meditations are popular amongst our respondents.
We also helped our client ask business questions for promotion concerns. This question helps us discover how users feel drinking coffee in order to further understand user behavior.
From this bar chart, I concluded that we have to account for the fact that not everyone is a coffee-drinker. To accommodate to users who do not like coffee, we can promote Mind Coffee's teas with mindfulness as well!
1:1 IN-DEPTH USER INTERVIEWS
After gauging the general understanding of our target audience, I created an interview plan and conducted an in-depth user interview. My goals through conducting in-depth user interviews were to understand the user better and create more qualitative questions to get more details and nuances. I aimed to learn more about a select few surveyed users’ daily routine and how Mind Coffee and mindfulness have and could play into their life. Secondarily, I wanted to gauge their impressions of our biggest competitors' user interfaces (Headspace and Calm). Lastly, I wanted to gauge their thoughts on mindful apps in general, and pick their brain about the features that they would be most interested in.
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I made sure that I did not ask any leading questions, and I introduced the purpose of my interview through the preface. I also got to know my interviewee better for user persona development. Overall, the interview duration was around 25 minutes.
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I carefully crafted each question with a purpose in learning something new because I thought it was important to make sure that each question was useful and gave us insightful information we needed. To ensure that, I wrote out the rationale behind every question.
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KEY INSIGHTS - INTERVIEWS
TOP FEATURES REQUESTS
- Guided meditations
- Inspirational quotes
- Colors, sounds, visuals that invoke positive, calm feelings
(Headspace: very bright/happy feeling, Calm: cool-toned/calm feeling)
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GENERAL MORNING ROUTINE
- Wake up, eat, drink coffee, do work
Satisfaction level: somewhat (room for improvement)
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MINDFULNESS TO INTERVIEWEES WERE ABOUT
- Calm, peace, being in-tune with one's body and mind
Ways they practiced: awareness & guided meditations
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MAIN PROBLEM WITH MINDFULNESS APPS
- Hard to be consistent with it
Updated Note: After discussing with client, we plan to include a streak feature to the app with every log-in to obtain free drinks after a certain streak number n order to incentivize using the app and continue mindfulness practices!
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HOW WOULD USERS USE MIND COFFEE APP FOR MINDFULNESS?
- Coffee meditations focusing on different types of coffee/tea (depending on the coffee/tea the user is drinking)
- Walking meditations focusing on walking with their focused attention on their movement
- Guided meditations focused on breathing
- Track their mood for self-awareness and journal
- Access mental health resources in the community
USER PERSONAS
Using the data we gathered from our user research and the conclusions we made from it, my team and I created 3 user personas on FigJam to further understand our target audience we are designing for.
Mine!
WHITEBOARDING/USER FLOW
After understanding our users, my team and I had a whiteboarding session to brainstorm app features and pages. In addition, we turned the whiteboarding sketch into a user flow diagram in order to show the path of a user from start to finish of our app.
PROTOTYPING CURRENTLY IN PROGRESS
FULL CASE STUDY COMING SOON!​
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