Background
The National Wellness Institute is an organization founded in 1977 with the mission of providing health promotion and wellness professionals unparalleled resources and services that fuel professional and personal growth.
NWI offers certification and training for wellness professionals, providing them with frameworks and tools that they can use to help clients achieve their wellness goals. The company has been very successful over the years and their annual National Wellness Conference has become the most highly acclaimed professional conference in health and wellness.
The institute defines wellness as an active process through which people become aware of, and make choices toward, a more successful existence.
Challenge
With my teammate Julie (Digitalgalaxy), we had two weeks to come up with an iOS mobile application. Our goal was to create an easy to use product where users can set, track and share their goals, with gaming and rewarding aspects to better help users to invest themselves in the long term
— Research
Market Research
The wellness market is estimated to $1.5 trillion and a latest study from McKinsey & Company shows that consumers care deeply about wellness — and that their interest is growing. In a survey of roughly 7,500 consumers in six countries, 79% of the respondents said they believe that wellness is important, and 42% consider it a top priority.
We were also curious to see the correlation between video games and mental health. According to Forbes, the gaming industry has seen a 73% growth since the beginning of 2020, and over the last five years, there has been more research linking video gaming to positive mental health and well-being. Researches published in Frontier of Psychology that video games can be therapeutic in nature and can serve as a stress reduction tool as we go through our own troubling times. Many people report playing video games helps them to relax after a long day at work. So often, video games help people find a sense of control and video games can be a safe and comfortable escape from real-life stressors.
While some video games talk about mental health and raise awareness to several troubles like depression or anxiety (like Gris or Celeste), others provide support and comfort by offering players the opportunity to focus and manage everyday tasks, or to escape into an infinite open world (Red Dead Redemption 2, The Witcher 3, Skyrim).
Competitors Analysis
But with great popularity in wellness, comes lot of competitors. During our research, we decided to focus on four different apps: Calm, Petit Bambou and Balance, all three are widely used relaxation/meditation apps and Habitica, a motivation/gamification app.
Feature Analysis & Market Positioning Map
The feature analysis and market positioning map show us that there is an opportunity in the gamification dimension.
Feature analysis of our competitors
Even though Habitica helps manage everyday tasks through gamification, the app is complex to use, leaving us with a wide open spot for our ideal brand position.
Market positioning map and our ideal brand position
User Survey
To better understand the market and the users, we conducted a survey, 57 people responded.
Overview of our survey results
While almost 58% of them are women, more than 40% of them are regularly confronted with stress and anxiety in their daily lives, but only 12.3% say they meditate. However, 84.2% said they play video games often.
User Interviews
We followed our survey with six user interviews. We wanted to know how they deal with stress and anxiety in their daily lives, as well as their video game habits and the positive effects they can have on their mental health.
Quotes from our interviewees
We found that all of our interviewees use almost daily a wellness app and do activities like meditation, breathing exercises to handle their stress and anxiety.
All of our interviewees also like to play video games and found it help them relax and forget about their problems. Some play The Sims to have a sense of control, while others like construction games like Minecraft to focus on repetitive tasks, or MMORPGs like The Elder Scrolls Online to immerge themselves in a fantastic world.
— Define
Affinity Diagram
With our user research we realized that some themes were coming back regularly and we were able to split all our findings in an affinity diagram to get a better overview of the pain points and opportunities.
Jobs stories & Jobs To Be Done
We created three jobs stories to look at our users situations and motivations and what can come out of those.
When I feel anxious I want to do suitable exercises and occupy my senses so that I can refocus.
When I feel worry, I need to occupy myself in a rewarding and playful way so that I can take a step back.
When I feel bad I want to see my progress and how far I have come to keep my motivation.
We categorized the Jobs Stories to isolate the functional and emotional aspects to describe the tasks that customers want to achieve.
User Persona
We made a user persona, Jade, to represent the goals and characteristics of our group of users.
Jade lives in a stressful environment and feels the need to take care of her mental health as often as necessary, sometimes every day. She is looking for an easy, fun and customisable app.
User Journey Map
Let’s take a look at Jade’s current user journey to illustrate the opportunities for our product and how we can answer to our user persona’s pain points.
Scenario
After work, Jade is feeling anxious. She has trouble breathing and needs some time to calm down. She reaches to her usual app and open it. Unfortunetaly, the app lacks personalization and doesn’t provide any breathing exercise that she really needs right now.
Problem Statement & Hypothesis Statement
All this research led us to the problem statement and hypothesis statement that helped us define our main objective for our product:
People who are sensitive to mental health issues need a way to manage their stress and anxiety so that they can take care of their well-being in a fun and playful way .
We believe that creating a product that allows people who are sensitive to mental health issues to relax, control their anxiety and create new habits while having fun and feeling rewarded will improve their well-being and daily lives.
How Might We
To conclude our define stage, we generated three “How Might We” to help define the product even further and find features and design opportunities.
How might we help people with anxiety to better manage their stress through game and relaxation?
How might we offer custom and personalized exercises and coaching service to users based on their current mood and needs?
How might we improve the daily lives of people by helping them track their emotions and moods?
— Ideate
MOSCOW Method
Using the MOSCOW method, we have prioritized the features that we think will create an immersive, personalized and rewarding world to better support our users.
We decided to keep the RPG inspiration and add features that can usually be find in a wellness app, like meditation and breathing exercises, in the form of quests. We have also chosen to add avatar customisation, rewards to help create a new habit, stats and data to track progress and motivate our users and a daily mood assessment to help define the most suitable quests.
Minimum Viable Product
With all this informations, we were now able to write our Minimum Viable Product for The Quiet Quest.
The aim of the Quiet Quest app, at the bare minimum, is to allow users to take care of their mental health in a fun and playful way with customized exercices depending on their current needs and mood.
User Flow
We made a user flow to see all the steps our users will go through to complete different quests in our app. We tried to put ourselves in the shoes of a user who needs support and guidance in a nervous moment.
Concept Sketches
We divided the concept sketches between the two of us and we tested with five users. With the answers we were able to understand the key problems in our first draft:
1- For the personality selection users would prefer a scale from negative to positive rather than the other way round with emojis to understand more easily.
2- How the users validate the quests were not obvious at first glance.
3- And finally the icons in the navigation bar needed to be more simple and explicit.
Mid-Fidelity Wireframe
We moved to the mid fidelity wireframe for an IOS app and took into account our users feedback.
We changed the personality scale and created checkboxes to validate the tasks.
Details of the changes we made after the feedback from the concept sketches tests
— Visual Design
Visual Competitor Analysis
A visual competitor analysis helped us gather insights for design, functionality and gamification.
We realized that most of our competitors use cold tones such as violet, blue, grey, sometimes contrasted with warmer hues such as orange and yellow. The typography and iconography are usually kept classic, creating a simple and peaceful atmosphere.
They also usually have two different themes, light and dark, to ease the eyes.
Moodboard & Brand Attributes
Our moodboard was very difficult to choose as we were particularly inspired by the theme. We chose visuals that inspired us, with a friendly and soothing feeling, but also immersive and poetic. We wanted to add both our inspirations and mix our worlds to see what we can come out with.
We also generated brand attributes that we tested with 10 persons.
Style Guide
For our typography, we chose one with rustic serifs, Averia, for everything that is inherent to the game and its immersion, paired with a light and flexible font, Avenir, to give users system indications.
For the icons, we decided to use round-edged ones that are classic and easy to recognize for the users, but we also wanted to keep some elements relating to RPGs, with the little sword to represent the items library.
High-Fidelity Prototypes
We made two versions of our prototype, a light one and a dark one.
For the light one, we chose a very small palette, with woody and luminous tones to remind a forest adventure, closer to our first inspiration, the RPGs.
You can try the figma prototype of the light version here.
For the dark mode, we chose to go for something more dreamy, astral and mysterious with purple tones tinged with the blue of a night sky, and contrasted by the gold of the stars.
For the dark version figma prototype, check here.
— Next Steps
For the future of our project, we would like to focus on the journaling feature so users can keep track of their thoughts and days. We would also like to add an overview of the quests done so far and add more data in the profile section to track progress with more precision.
We want to add more customization too, with a wider choice of avatars and the possibility for users to add their own to-dos and challenges.
Finally, we would love to offer more maps and levels and create a vast and immersive world with it’s own story and characters.
— Key Learnings
Those two weeks went by really fast! I had a lot of fun working on this project and I’m so happy I got to do it with Julie. Not only did I learn a lot with her, but I’m glad I got to meet this incredible person and call her my friend.
Being able to work in more depth on the UI part of a project was amazing and we did a lot of testing of colour palettes before we found one that suited us. It took us a while to find our identity and colours, as we thought we needed a larger palette to make a good design. But in the end we realised we could make a much bigger impact and create a poetic and memorable experience with just a few ones.
I am very proud of the work done and the result we can share with you today. I look forward to our next challenge!
Thank you for reading!
