A UX UI Case Study- Mindfulness Application — Inspiration from Apple Watches.
Nowadays many people spend most of their time working and they are mostly occupied with their daily duties and responsibilities. As responsibilities increase, people tend to forget about self-care, health, and overall well-being.
There are abundant meditation and mindfulness apps available in the play store or App store but all these apps are unique in their way. Taking inspiration from these apps and breathe app from watchOS, I have designed a Mindfulness app for ios which is a combination of both breathing exercises stress management, and sleep Analysis with a simple interface design most suitable to IOS devices in both normal mode and dark mode.
User Research — to understand the need for Mindfulness apps and how users use these apps in day-to-day life.
A survey was conducted using Google Forms to understand the Problem statement and challenges in being mindful in their routine life. Out of 15 responses, 12 users were using mindfulness apps like Headspace, Prana Breathe, BHB breathing exercise, and finally Calm to keep them mindful during the day. Not only that, but I also made sure that I reach out to the right person to get detailed insights on users’ points of view about using these apps and how my app can be structured more usable than the one they are using.
The interview was conducted with 3 users over a phone call, and I was prepared with a few interview questions. It was a verbal interview and it was recorded with the proper consent taken from the user end. During the interview, the user’s perspective on mindfulness apps was recorded and analyzed. It was a friendly discussion, to make users stay in comfort and the answers were collected and analyzed.
Interview Findings and Insights
As explained above, people undergo multiple stress throughout the day. Managing stress through workouts has increased a lot these days. Consciously spending a few mins to hours a day can better enhance productivity potentially.
People try to maintain their conscious days by doing workouts in Gym with a trainer
Achieving motivation by balancing mental and physical health by listening to affirmations
Regularizing or making exercise a routine was the biggest challenge uttered from every user’s response.
One of the users interviewed shared that he is not able to sleep well at night because of his mobile phone and social media addiction.
At last, every user’s felt, a sense of improvement in health and an increase in productivity.
User flows — The flow of the screens was designed with the help of Invision Studio, Freehand user flows. Please click here to view user flow
Wireframes Design -
Once the user flows are defined, I started to design the low fid wireframes to get a basic layout and structure of the app using freehand Invision Studio. Once the basic functionalities are defined, I continued with High Fidelity UI designs with Color, Typography, Iconography, and Imagery / Illustrations SVG format. Wireframes were also designed with the help of Invision Studio and the same is found here. Please click here
Breathing Exercises
Idea is to provide various breathing exercises in one single app with a neat interface and impressive to users. This app serves both guided breathing and Custom style breathing, allowing the user to create new breathing styles or exercises, thereby energizing their day in an optimistic approach.
Every breathing style has three phases, Inhaling, Holding & exhaling. All phases are provided with appropriate intervals and Time duration that is customized to the user’s needs.
Listening to Affirmations- Being Positive, self-confidence, Motivation, Override negative thoughts.
Sleep Tracking and Analysis — Essential for sleep disorders
Disorders in sleeping patterns can affect the physical and mental health of any individual. Users above 15–35 years of age following irregular sleep habits, feel immense distractions due to mobile phones, social media, video games, and office goers taking night shifts and feeling sleepy during day time can get affected by Insomnia and other sleep-related disorders.
After conducting preliminary research with users, I felt I could collaborate sleep behavior analysis feature into this app for users’ welfare. They can set their in-bed time and wake-up time with this tracker and the app starts to track and monitor their sleep. With the Swasam app, we can even listen to guided affirmations for getting better sleep and switch on the tracker mode.
Heart Rate Monitor- Pulse checking and Insights
This feature included in this app may be helpful to all kinds of users who want to monitor their pulse rates whenever required. Despite watches, this comprehensive app can be an alternative for anyone who couldn’t afford to buy an expensive watch OS and other such kinds.
Wrapping things up
To summarize, this project is a personal user experience design project of mine with the idea to design a breathing app interface- inspiration from the Apple watch-OS. This app was designed with the goal to keep the user interface simple and aesthetic, and tried out designing in two modes normal mode and dark mode. The timeline taken to complete this project was two weeks and this was a great opportunity for me to showcase my design skills on an excellent platform. I thank all the people who responded to survey and volunteered for user interviews.
