Understanding the problem space
As meditation becomes mainstream, more and more people are turning towards some type of meditation to improve their general wellness. 9.3 million U.S. adults have used meditation in the past year.
Meditation has a lot of benefits, such as: helping to increase focus and attention, fight stress, be more creative, and so on. However, those who start meditating don’t do it regularly. We wanted to understand what are the challenges around the practice of meditation that people have, and create an experience to solve those challenges.
A path to reach new conclusions
To better understand the needs that people have and their pain points, we defined a series of questions and began researching the problem.
- Who are the users that are using self-care apps? What do they use to meditate? Do they know what meditation is, and what its the benefits are? What are the current market trends? Market insights helped us here.
- What are the available apps out there? What apps do people like or dislike? We did a competitive analysis, to understand the problem space.
- Why people do certain things around meditation? And, what are their current pain points? We conducted User interviews to help us to validate our hypothesis based on market research.
- We analyzed Customer comments in several apps to get a better understanding of what are other pain points in current apps.
- How does a solution feel? Rapid Prototyping helped us understand if we were going in the right direction.
1. Market Data & Survey
The Market research we performed provided us the following insights:
- The Majority of people that meditate are females, at least college-educated.
- Minority populations, as well as seniors, were less likely to use meditation.
- The majority of users practice more than one type of meditation, and they use more than one app for their needs.
- These findings also indicated that mental health problems were the most important reason to use meditation.
2. Competitors: Evaluation of Mindfulness-Based Apps
The slightly outdated research from 2015 from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov has some interesting results. While there were 700 apps available for meditation at that time (this number is now 1000), some apps were duplicated, some didn’t work at all, and a large number didn’t meet the basic criteria set by the study. Only 23 apps met the criteria of engagement, functionality, visual aesthetics, and information quality. While the research is old, it provides us with a good sense of the quantity vs quality gap.
3. User interviews
We performed user interviews to help us to understand the user’s behavior. We conducted the interviews with 6 participants over the phone over a period of several days. We interview people that have used meditation in the past and have at least one meditation app installed on their phone. The insights we gathered from the interviews are:
- People don’t mind paying for an app, but they have only one paid app, and the rest of the apps they have they use only from time to time.
- Using the same app every time gets boring, people need different content, so they substitute paid apps with free resources.
- YouTube and Spotify are the go-to places for free meditation content.
- The regularity of usage fluctuates (people often lose motivation): “I don’t have time for that,” “I know that it’s good for me, but I kind of get lazy and end up not doing it.”
4. User comments
Reading user comments gave us a few valuable insights:
- People like quick access to a timer.
- They want the ability to go backward and forwards during the meditation.
- They want to be able to navigate between a number of content categories easily.
- People want to see some resources related to teaching the basics of meditation.
Targeted audience
Based on the research, the user that is more likely to use meditation is a female, between 35 and 50 years old. They are more open to new experiences. They have a high desire for growth and self-improvement. They are highly educated and more likely to have some type of stress in their life. They want to meditate because the effects of stress can be manifested on emotional, behavioral and physical levels (low energy, thinking ability, depression, etc.).
Creating a statement
Once we were done with the user research, market research, and competitive analysis we were ready to create a statement:
* * * * *
HMW help busy people with high intent for conscious personal self-management to have one place to do their meditation practice, and even stimulate and inspire a regular meditation practice?
* * * * *
Then we translated this statement into the goals that the app should accomplish.
GOAL 1/4:
The role of the product — Platform for Stress Management, Mental Health & Well-being
The key value of Deeply is the alignment of a personalized experience, modern engaging design, and a large number of resources exceeding by far most of the available apps in the meditation space.
Goal 2/4:
Quality: Aesthetic in the form of Usability
The basics of quality are usability and functionality. Beyond that, two important principles increase the likelihood and engagement of a product; those are attractiveness and familiarity.
- Attractiveness is vital because people perceive products that are visually pleasing as higher quality and more usable.
- Familiarity is essential because we like things that are familiar: familiarity helps support an established mindset about certain things.
The content of the app is something that people are used to; it contains guided meditations, timer, breathing exercises, as well as relaxing music & sounds.
GOAL 3/4:
All resources in one place
Deeply is a mental wellness app that integrates with services such as Spotify and YouTube to provide free content.
It’s highly curated, with the ability for the user to add their own content.
It also provides hundreds of Deeply meditations, music, and sounds to help with anxiety relief, stress, and more.
GOAL 4/4:
What would increase motivation?
We used a psychological perspective to look for answers on what motivates people to do meditation, beyond just pure external triggers, such as preset reminders. The motivators we found are:
- Situational — The need will be different based on the situation. Stressful events such as preparing for a big event can be a trigger. It led us to create categories specific to different situations, such as big events, “waking up.”
- Emotional state — Regardless of what is happening in our life, we have days when things just don’t feel right. It led us to create categories such as: “Happiness”.
- Humans have the need to complete tasks — We feel bad if we don’t finish what we started. We created a set of packages, such as “7 days to find your focus” instead of having just a single meditation track.
How can we engage people even more?
People are looking to find a sense of meaning, creativity, and individualism. They are looking for the ability to express themselves and to create something unique that will separate them from others. Even if what we create is not as appealing, our perspective and connection with it will be different.
For this reason, we explored these concepts:
- The ability for the user to create a mix of different sounds and save them, and replay them any time.
This feature describes the deep need that humans have to be creative and to own their ideas. If we put some effort into something, we will like it more. We want to leave our footprints in what we do.
👉 Part 2: Leveling up: The UX & Visual Improvements 👈
Follow us for more updates, as we continue to work on other problems. Check out the final product 👉 here 👈.
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