Calmspace:
Digital Anxiety Solutions
A consumer-facing mobile app that offers a free digital space for people to relax, reduce digital anxiety, and manage mental well-being through individual and group activities.
OVERVIEW
Calmspace is a mobile design concept dedicated to solving digital anxiety among young adults. In this two-month project, I worked myself from end to end, tackling challenges from researching, interviewing, identifying user pain points, to wireframing the solutions that help people manage anxiety from using digital by offering a series of individual and group-based activities, ranging from yoga, sports to music.
TEAM
Just myself 😬
WORK
Mobile Design, Visual Design, UX Research
TOOLS
Figma, Principle, Illustrator, Photoshop✏️
DURATION
February - April 2022
Outcome
Overview
Designing a free digital space for people to relax from digital anxiety, and manage mental well-being through self-focused individual and interactive group activities.
Background
Anxiety in teens and adults is an increased common issue, especially related to the “always connected” existence most of us find ourselves in today. There is a need for a digital product that helps consumers with their mental health.
Challenge
How might we raise awareness of anxiety among people using digital technologies and address the existence of “always connected” to manage their mental well-being?
Research
Competitive kickoff
I conducted a series of competitive analysis among existing mobile-based apps such as Headspace, Calm, Aura, and etc. Understanding their business models, functionalities and overall usability, I outlined some key metrics with reference to iTunes user reviews and app features.
Synthesize
I summarized all the findings and the targeted user group into three design opportunities:
Strategies
How might we raise awareness of anxiety among people using digital technologies and address the existence of “always connected” to manage their mental well-being?
Goals
I outlined three important business and user goals that determine my decisions to the product features. The last column, the value proposition, serves to provide a holistic view of addressing all-in-one services for users.
Brainstorm
Emerging idea - users can explore different kinds of stress-free activities by individual and groups, take daily quizzes to earn badges, and in the meanwhile they have a profile dashboard to keep track of their social media usage and membership information.
Sketches by pen helped me capture different pieces of the experience to understand users.
Information
Architecture
Visualizing navigation and hierarchy. I created a structure to better picture how information is constructed, and how each pages is related.
A/B Testing
I experimented with the most efficient ways of grouping top features based on the user’s browsing habits. Then I ran two quick A/B testing sessions on the home screen ("Myself" and "Group") to discover which option users prefer the most: swiping sessions for individual activities and scrolling horizontally for recent group activities.
Solution
Visual
system
I got the inspiration of the following color combination from Pantone, where they together represent peace and love, particularly offering a caring, stress-free environment that can motivate users to be more aware of digital anxiety and take care well. Besides colors, I picked Poppins as the only typeface because of its readability and simplicity.
Final design
Onboarding
The first step is to introduce Calmspace by giving a guided introduction. User interact with the screen by swiping horizontally. A series of flow tells what “digital anxiety” is, highlighting the importance of “disconnecting” from the technologies, but at the same time finding new ways to connect with people more healthily.
Myself vs. Group activities
The home page brings people choices of managing mental well-being via self-care or connecting with people.
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Everyone can access free sessions from “Today Inspiration” to help manage their mental health
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People can also unlock premium sessions below by redeeming badges.
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People can also connect with friends by taking group sessions
Earn rewards - Invite from group
The freemium model allows people to earn more badges by the following options, so they can take more premium sessions for free. The first option of earning badges (rewards) is by inviting other people from the Group section to join the wellness session.
Earn rewards - take daily questions
The second option of earning badges is by taking daily check-in questions under the Learning section to receive rewards immediately.
Redeem and unlock premium
Users can unlock any premium session under the Self section immediately upon earning the badges.
Profile Dashboard
Smart analysis of user data and profile that gives an overview of user’s performance.
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Personal section shows data of membership, friends and sessions already taken
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Reward section shows data of badges earned through taking check-in questions, friends invitation and simply purchase.
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“My social media usage” allows to check daily usage as a reference.
Testing
Due to the time constraint, I decided to invite two potential users who were asked to complete two primary tasks with the prototypes to identify problems in the design and to learn about more user preferences that can be improved in the next step.
Success metrics
At both product and design levels, it's crucial to identify key success metrics of a product. For Calmspace, I listed two prioritized metrics for both short-run and long-run goals based on the market and user needs:
User testing
At both product and design levels, it's crucial to identify key success metrics of a product. For Calmspace, I listed two prioritized metrics for both short-run and long-run goals based on the market and user needs:
I felt somehow overwhelmed still when browsing the group sessions on the home page, especially when seeing many people registered for the events. Is there another way to be even less stressed on that, maybe adding more options to leverage privacy?
I was super excited about this product but is there a way to be less dependent? Since the goal is to reduce digital anxiety but this is a digital product...
Next steps
What can further be improved and work with a small team in the next phase?
Retrospective
Design😎
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Finding ways to help people monitor digital usage and to be even less dependent, and inform engineers how to connect backend data with front-end design
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Allow users to engage in more personalized choices, including options of taking sessions with desired amount of people
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Explore in other directions and technologies, stronger branding
Thank you, what learned🤓?
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“Don't boil the ocean”: there are lots of factors affecting digital anxiety on people, so it’s crucial to scope down the ultimate problem spaces, targeted user groups during research, as well as to determine the right scope and decision at the early stage.
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Involve targeted users during the process: it is also important to allow actual users to engage with the design in each key phase, providing valuable feedback that can validate the usability.
