Role
User Researcher
Visual Designer
Branding Designer
Interactive Designer
Tool
Figma
Adobe Illustrator
Duration
4 Weeks
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PROJECT OVERVIEW
Restful Support
Restful Support is an end-to-end mobile app project that was developed as a part of Designlab’s UX Bootcamp.
Restful Support is a sleep aid app with a strong focus on mental health. Quality sleep health depends on several factors, such as proper sleep hygiene, maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, maintaining sleep continuity throughout the night, and getting enough sleep every single night. Anxiety and depression are major common factors that make it hard for people to fall asleep or stay asleep.
In order to address this problem, the research stage explored how anxiety and depression impact people’s sleep health.
Strategy planning
Problem
Sleep is an essential factor in humans’ physical health and mental health. Good quality sleep helps restore bodily functions, boosts your immune system, improves memory function, and decreases mental stress. It could be argued that sleep is just as important as important as food, water, and oxygen. Poor sleep health can increase the risks of mental health disorders, cardiovascular diseases, hormone imbalances, diabetes, dementia, and immunodeficiency. Since anxiety is a common factor for chronic poor sleep health, the app will focus on the best solutions for improving people’s night-time related anxieties.
Solution
This app will focus on the mental health side of sleep. The app will provide resources for mindful grounding techniques, simple guided meditations, and a sleep tracker so users can keep track of their sleep health. The research stage explores what people need in order to feel mindful before they sleep. Mental health is a board topic, so it is important that Restful Support covers a large variety of the different aspects of anxiety.
Goal
The project’s goal is to create an app that will help users decrease their anxiety in order to improve their overall sleep health. The app’s prototype will showcase a self-guided feature that helps users with their night-time related anxiety. It is important to understand anxiety’s influence on sleep and users’ prior experiences with mental health apps, so Restful Support can provide the best solutions to address the user base problems.
Research Stage
The research stage closely examine the problem in order to find the best solutions for the problem. This stage closely explores the current trends in the mental health market, defines user’s needs and point points, and develops some possible solutions for the problem.
Competitive Analysis
There are many online resources that aim to help users with their mental health and sleep health. It’s important to understand what are the most common features in the market. The competitive analysis was a detailed SWOT analysis of popular mental health and sleep apps; Headspace, Calm, and Meditopia.
Interviews
The app’s primary audience are adults. The participants are adults from the 18 to 60 age range. Some participants are very familiar with meditation apps, while other participants have no experience with meditation apps. Overall, these are people who are interested in improving their sleep health and mental health.
Key Takeaways From The Interviews
Most participants mentioned they frequently experience negative ruminating thoughts, anxiety, stress, and feeling burnout before going to bed. They noticed how they usually feel more anxious at night; they don’t feel the same amount of anxiety or burnout in the morning.
Some participants experience little to no anxiety at night. However, they still want to use resources to improve their sleep health and sleep quality.
The participants want to see an app that offers personalized content; e.g meditations, affirmations, breathing exercises, stories, and breathing exercises. Participants who are familiar with mental health apps enjoy using them, however, they dislike it when apps hide most of their content behind a paywall. The free content is too limited and too general to help them with their specific mental health problems.
Affinity Mapping
User Personas
The user personas represent the individuals from the interviews. There are two personas; people who are motivated to improve their night-time related anxieties, and individuals who are primarily motivated to improve their sleep.
The first persona represents someone who chronically struggles with anxiety. They are motivated to seek help and utilize resources to address their anxieties.
The second persona represents someone who doesn’t experience a lot of anxiety. They have no trouble sleeping, but they are motivated to maintain and track their sleeping health.
Persona 1: Wants Mental Health Resources
Persona 2: Wants To Improve Sleep Health
Research POVs
1. I’d like to explore ways to help people who want emotional support in their learning process connect with other like-minded people, because they feel motivated and validated when they see other people make active progress towards their learning goals.
2. I’d like to explore ways to help people who do not have a lot of spare time quickly find reliable necessary resources for their learning goals, because they become frustrated and de-motivated when they stay stuck on a problem for too long.
3. I’d like to explore ways to help people who want to discover tasks that are short and simple, because they feel validated when they can complete tasks that are interesting, quick, and relevant to their learning goals.
Research HMW
1. How might we support people who struggle with chronic ruminating thoughts?
2. How might we help people regulate their nervous systems before they fall asleep?
3. How might we help people feel more comfortable about following a guided meditation to help them fall asleep?
After conducting the competitive analysis, interviews, user personas, and the research POVs and HMWs; it was time to test features for the app. My competitive analysis showed that most apps had audio focused content such as meditation, audiobooks, and guided breathing exercises. While, according to the interviews, most users want to see features that allow flexibility, variety, and personalization. I created user flows, feature roadmap, site map in order to conceptualize these features.
These three documents are the first iterations for the features. The user flows look over three features. A sleep assessment test, a personalized affirmation setting, and a user selecting a meditation program. The feature roadmap outlines the developmental plan in the order of “must-have” to “can add later”. The results of the competitive analysis and the interviews provided the basis for these features. Finally, the site map is a simple overview of all the app’s features and services.
User Flows
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Card Sorting
Site Mapping
Research Wrap-Up
Overall, the research findings showed that users want their sleep apps to be flexible, have a variety of content, and show personalized content for users. People have different needs. For instance, people have different lifestyles, chronotype, and different experiences with anxiety. There are users who frequently experience anxiety, while there are also users who rarely or never feel anxious. Restful Support needs to be able to address the needs of both groups.
The design explores the branding design concepts, the wireframes, prototype, and the UI kit.
Branding Design Stage
The brand’s design is based on the aesthetics commonly found in sound scapes; nature and rain. Restful Support has a dark, comforting, and cozy aesthetic that encourages users to take a deep breath and relax before they fall asleep.
Restful Support Brand Style Title
Logo Designs
Lo-Fi Logo Designs
Detailed Specs Covering Each Page
UI kit
Mid Fidelity Wireframes
The Mid fidelity wireframes look over a couple features. The homepage, dashboard, profile, download page, programs, and a sleep timer. These features were intended to be the main features of the app, however, after conducting a user test, these features had to change.
Most participants explained how they wanted to see more of these features. They wanted to see the creating account process, explore the options in the profile, they want a sleep tracker, view the mood reflection process, and they wanted to see more resources for sleep health and mental health. The timer also needed to be changed because the concept was counterproductive to the users’ goals.
Overall, the participants like the app’s concept and the features. But they wanted to see more features, in order to fully understand what services the app has to offer to their users.
The mid fidelity wireframes look over the homepage, dashboard, profile, in-progress content, user’s favorite content, user’s downloaded content, the app’s programs, and the sleep timer.
Mid Fidelity Wireframes Close Up
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High Fidelity Wireframes
The high fidelity wireframes greatly expand on the features from the mid fidelity wireframes. This wireframe showcases the creating account process and the assessment test that offers users the opportunity to set up personalized content and personalized recommendation. I redid the Dashboard so that users can now view the top trending programs, their recommendations, and quickly jump into one of their favorite programs. The app now has a sleep tracker that keeps track over the user’s sleep duration, sleep quality, and sleep mood.
The program has been greatly expanded, so now users can search for programs that address specific mental health needs. The app now has a notification system. This notification system allows users to set up a morning check-in, afternoon check-in, and a bedtime check-in that reminds users to get ready to sleep. Users can set up their own schedule or they could use the sleep calculator. This sleep calculator creates an optimal sleep schedule based on the user’s age, biology, lifestyle, and personal schedule. This calculator operates based on the standards of the CDC recommendations for good sleep health.
The high fidelity wireframes look over all the app’s features. The homepage, sleep assessment test, dashboard, user’s profile, profile settings, weekly progress report, mood reflection, affirmation setting, the app’s programs, and the sleep calculator.
Prototype
The prototype allows participants to explore the full app. Participants can create an account, complete the assessment test, explore the dashboard, check out the profile settings, view the sleep tracker, the mood reflection process, explore programs, and use the sleep calculator.
Overall, participants like the prototype test; they found the app to be appealing, easy to navigate, and flexible to the needs of a lot of different users. Participants like how they could set up their own personalized affirmations, view mental health tips on their dashboards, and set up their own bedtime routine with the sleep calculator.
The high fidelity wireframes and the prototype both successfully showcased features that address the needs of the user personas. These features allow for a lot of flexibility, variety, and personalization; in short, users can easily find programs that suit their specific night-time related anxieties.
Prototype Test Link
Conclusion
Restful Support was a project created as a part of Designlabs’s UX Bootcamp. This project helped me further develop my skills as a designer and researcher. I learned how to research mental health apps, interview participants, conduct tests, and design an end-to-end mobile app. I am grateful for my mentor’s guidance and the thoughtful feedback that I’ve gotten from my mentor and peers.
Conclusion
Restful Support was a project created as a part of Designlabs’s UX Bootcamp. This project helped me further develop my skills as a designer and researcher. I learned how to research mental health apps, interview participants, conduct tests, and design an end-to-end mobile app. I am grateful for my mentor’s guidance and the thoughtful feedback that I’ve gotten from my mentor and peers.