Calmness Companion

Your companion on the journey to a stress-free life.

Role: UX Researcher

UX/UI Designer

Competitive Analysis

What They Do

Strengths

Weaknesses

Interviews

  • Provides content to talk about critical health needs in America

  • Provides educational resources in easily digestible forms

  • Excellent educational tools, solid programming, events and videos

  • Layouts and UI are a bit clunky

  • Doesn’t scale well on phone compared to desktop

Timeline: 2 months

MINDFULNESS COACH

  • Self-guided program to teach mindfulness practices to veterans and those experiencing PTSD

  • Unique resources for those with PTSD, a self guided system of exercises and resources

  • Can be useful for anyone

  • UI is not always straightforward

  • App could be more visually engaging

Tool: Figma

Calmness Companion is a mobile application that teaches users techniques to destress and live a more balanced life. Additionally, it helps users track their progress and schedule their time efficiently.

The Problem

As someone who gets overwhelmed and stressed by the challenges of daily life, I wanted to find an app that would provide me with useful tools to combat the stress of a difficult day. Discovering that I wasn’t alone, I interviewed others who sought a tool to help them balance their stress and went on to create Calmness Companion as a solution to provide learning and support.

User Research

Building upon this concept, I began the research process. I did competitive analysis to cross-reference with competition and find out what does and doesn’t work when designing a tool for mental health; I also conducted user interviews to gain a better understanding of different people's stances on their mental health and how they care for themselves.

Goals

  • Understand how people define “mental health” and what it means for them to care for their mental health

  • Learn what people already do to care for their mental health and see how those tools can be improved

  • Find out what motivates people to care for their mental health and what we can provide to increase that motivation

  • Discover the roadblocks preventing people from getting the care and education they need to better tend to their mental health

  • Uses CBT to provide users with tools to help improve their mental state

  • Comprehensive mood tracker

  • Easy to use, clear, concise, and visually engaging

  • Graphics could be more brand-focused

  • Lacks other resources outside of tracking

By exploring the choices made by designers in other applications, I wanted to create a tool that could be useful to anyone—something clean, straightforward, and easy to use that anyone in any stage of life with any level of stress could benefit from.

Platform: Mobile

2 women • 2 men • 1 nonbinary

25 - 30 years old

Students and professionals

Some questions I asked:

  • How would you describe your mental health? Would you say you feel mentally healthy? Why do you feel this way?

  • What do you currently do on a regular basis to care for your mental health? How does it help? How do you feel these things are lacking?

  • What resources do you feel like you have to educate yourself on how to care for your mental health? How do they help you stay mentally healthy?

  • When was the last time you spoke with a mental health professional? When was the last time you felt you needed to speak with a mental health professional? How was the conversation / interaction beneficial to you? How was it lacking?

  • How do you feel you learn the most effectively? Are you a visual learner or do you like to read through material in order to better understand something? Do you prefer watching a video or reading an article? Why?

  • What do you feel you need to learn more about when it comes to caring for your mental health? How would you go about learning this?

5 participants

Insights

  • All participants felt they had mental health concerns that they are not fully addressing and unanimously agreed that they should be taking steps towards feeling mentally healthier.

  • Some participants had more experience than others with caring for their mental health.

  • Participants felt there are many resources to use for their mental health, but most expressed either disinterest in them or a lack of faith in their efficacy.

  • All unanimously said they were visual learners, preferring hands on demonstration and instructional videos over articles when learning something new.

User Personas

With the information from my research under my belt, I went on to create user personas that sought to push the bounds of what a mental health tool could accomplish.

Site Map

I designed the site map to be simple and accessible. The app’s structure changed greatly over the design process, and its site map changed along with it to better fit the needs of the user.

User Flows

I outlined a few basic user flows to test the structure of the app. These flows were later used in my usability tests to see how efficiently users could navigate through the experience.

Wireframes

With a solid structure in place, I went on to draw up some low and mid fidelity wireframes. From here, the designs were refined and key elements were added, such as the Calmness Companion mascot, the warm and friendly look, and the inviting language. These components were crafted to create high fidelity wireframes.

Usability Testing

1 woman • 2 men • 2 nonbinary

23 - 30 years old

3 task flows

30 - 45 minute testing sessions

After creating a prototype for Calmness Companion, I conducted usability tests to determine how I could improve the user experience. Some of my goals were to:

  • Determine how long it takes a user to complete certain tasks

  • Discover what parts of the experience users find confusing or difficult

  • Identify usability issues and address hitches in the user experience

5 participants

Iterations

Updated sliding scale notation

Enlarged month name on calendar

Added screen to allow user to add personal events to calendar

Added screen to lesson for user to practice new skills

Takeaways

Some of the designs I thought were the most straightforward turned out to be the most difficult for users to follow. I realized that taking a step back and considering the work from a fresh user‘s perspective is very valuable.

Additionally, it’s clear that usability testing is a vital part of the design process: without it, I’d never have known what was working in my designs and what needed to be reconsidered.

Users noted the simplicity of my designs and how easy they found it to follow the prompts I provided due to this simplicity. However, there were many things pointed out to me during usability testing that serve to improve upon this simplicity and make the designs even clearer and more concise.

Conclusion

Calmness Companion offers an app that successfully teaches users practical skills to help manage their stress. The UX/UI design and overall flow of the product led to user satisfaction and a high level engagement with the inviting and user-friendly app.

The wide variety of skills offered and scheduling and therapy features allowed the user to easily track their time and progress through Calmness Companion, while successfully measuring their progress and the skills they have learned.

Next Steps

I’d like to connect Calmness Companion with health tracking devices and apps like Fitbit, Google Fit, and Apple Health. This would allow users to see how their activity levels, heart rate, and overall health metrics affect their mental health.