Adding new features to Flow Lab
UX/UI design case study
I have been a certified yoga instructor for three years, and I enjoy observing with my students how yoga can relieve chronic pains and help with emotional wellness.
By choosing to become a UX designer, one of my goals was to contribute to well-being projects in tech. That’s why during a two weeks sprint, I teamed up with another UX designer and yoga teacher, Arthur Sean O’Connor. We worked on the app Flow Lab, with the help of the Design Thinking Process. Let’s go!
Flow Lab, When Mindfulness Meets Productivity
Flow Lab is a Berlin-based project which started in 2018 and is a mental coach for optimal performance.
Flow Lab aims to improve performance and efficiency through audio-guided meditations to work on long-term growth and life balance.
Most of the well-being apps like Calm, Headspace, or Mindshine chose soothing design and relaxing content. Flow Lab’s is situated between relaxation and performance, right in the market gap.
Flow Lab’s users are creatives, founders, or athletes who want to apply the power of mindfulness and meditation to achieve ease, drive, optimism, and focus. Improving each of these areas will put the user in the “Flow”.
So, how does it work? Once the user logs in, they will walk through questions to determine which growth aspect the app will focus on.
The app tailors a weekly program to improve the weakest area.
The user will regularly answer questions to update the score regarding the current mood.
Day after day, the user’s progression will be tracked and compiled in a “Flow score”.
Empathize and Define
During our first meeting, our stakeholder David Jacob suggested that we design new features to engage the users daily. He was opened to any direction our research could lead us.
We started with some quantitative research through surveys.
We identified two targets: the app users and all the well-being app users.
Here is what we discovered:
‣ 55% of the people find it difficult to stay engaged in a personal development program on a smartphone.
‣ 57% of the Flow Lab users are willing to use the app more often.
The qualitative researches, lead by interviewing personally some of the persons who filled our survey, confirmed that they would feel more engaged with individualized content and mood-boosting activities.
Ideate
We have gathered enough data during our user research. The next step: to synthesize it in order to turn data into actionable information.
We transferred all the data on a visual board. Before the pandemic, we would have probably used sticky notes on a white wall. In Corona times, when social distancing is our everyday life, a virtual wall and some digital sticky notes were more appropriate. And it looked like this:
From all this research, we created our persona Felix, a summary of all the material we collected.
Now, it’s time for brainstorming!
My teammate Arthur and I put some cool music on and chose to use the “Crazy 8” method. “Crazy 8” is an excellent tool in Design Thinking. It allows finding several answers to a problem. This workshop is fun, easy to set up, and explores unexpected directions.
How does it work? The idea is to fold an A4 page in this way to get 8 different boxes.
The goal is to fill the boxes in 8 minutes maximum. Yes, that’s quick!
By forcing ourselves to write 8 different ideas in such a short amount of time, it allows creative ideas to emerge freely.
We also added the “the worst idea’’ box. Some great inputs can surprisingly come up. Or at least, it will release the steam off!
This brainstorming went really smoothly because the users shared a lot of exciting ideas during the interviews.
After this brainstorming, we voted for our 4 favorite ideas:
🎯 Personal Goal
In the app, the user will be asked to write down a goal that they want to achieve in an encouraging and affirmative tone, a short sentence starting with “I am”. “I am successful”, “I am focused”, “I am driven”, or something more specific, like “I am having my portfolio done”. (Yep, that’s mine).
The personal goal will be regularly reminded through notifications or pop up in the app to keep the user remembering them. When the goal is reached, the user can check it in their goal’s list, increasing the Flow Score.
This feature is derivated from the Sankalpa, a part of the yoga practice. Repeating a goal like a mantra allows it to be effective and transformational in the long run. I used this technique with my yoga students, and it worked!
😌 Instant relief
This feature allows the user to start a session based on their current emotional state.
Currently, Flow Lab’s weekly session program focuses on one specific growth area. There is no option to adapt to the user's day-to-day emotional state.
The “Instant Relief” feature will take any situation into account whenever the user needs help in a specific situation.
🔥 Focus sounds
Throughout our research, many interviewees asked for a focus music option on Flow Lab. Before playing the music, the user will set a timer and start a task. When the timer is over, the user should have finished it.
Having a time frame will improve efficiency. These data will be then added to the Flow Score so the user can track this progress.
🥊 Weekly Challenge
Once a week, the coach offers a challenge based on the growth area the user is currently working on. For example, if the user needs to work on their ability to focus, the challenge would be to practice an exercise that leads to more focus. Every week, the challenge will become more ambitious.
That all for the features ideas.
During this 2 weeks sprint, we chose to explore two of these four features. But which one of them?
We scheduled one-to-one interviews with Flow Lab users and asked them directly about features they would prefer to see in the app. Although they were keen on having all of them, the features that got the most votes were the Instant relief and the Weekly Challenge.
Prototype and Test
Once we have all these elements, we can start the prototyping.
We started with a low-fidelity prototype to test concepts and iterate quickly at a low cost. This step is usually completed with a pen and a sheet of paper. But the call of the tablet was too tempting, so we made it digital on Procreate.
The big pro is that it’s even easier to iterate with the eraser tool and the layers. The main con is we lose the paper's flexibility that allows us to cut and reorganize the frames. Also, paper is way cheaper, right?
Let’s reveal the low fidelity draft for the feature “Weekly Challenge”:
We made some iterations, and once we were satisfied, we designed an interactive mid-fidelity prototype in Figma. This allows fast and cheap iterations and helps the testers to stay focused on the interaction fluidity.
We got this mid-fi tested by users, again and again. During the test, we wrote down all the difficulties encountered during the navigation. And iterate until the last tester could complete all the user flow with ease.
Design analysis
We were wondering how the Flow Lab’s current design is perceived. To check that out, we created a mood board with some screenshots. We created a survey with 10 different attributes and asked the interviewees to pick the 5 that would describe the mood the best.
The results of the survey:
‣ 71 %: Ambitious
‣ 71 %: Efficient
‣ 67 %: Professional
‣ 60 %: Masculine
‣ 39 %: Aggressive
The three first attributes Ambitious, Efficient, Professional fits Flow Lab’s brand attributes.
We created a new mood board to soften the masculine and aggressive feeling while staying true to the original branding. We remove the pictures, created abstract backgrounds, and created a new logo. The result looks more soothing and gender-neutral.
Once the mid-fidelity prototype was finished and the mood board defined, we could put on the glitters!
The interactive prototype
The final step is to build a high-fidelity prototype. We adapted our mid-fidelity wireframe to achieve a smoother interaction design.
In the animation above, you can discover the two User Flows that we conceived through the lens of our persona, Felix.
- Felix is having a stressful day and has a hard time focusing. He wants to calm down and be more efficient. He will go to the “Instant Relief” section, answer questions, and access the best session for him.
- Felix is feeling more focused and feels ready for the Challenge of the week. This audio session invites the user to accomplish a task while listening. The challenge of this week is the Distraction List. Felix will choose a task to do and set a timer. Each time he loses focus and thinks about something else, he will write this down. We his first task will be completed, he can and return to it when his initial task is complete. This way, it is easier to let go of these thoughts.
Conclusion
It was a gratifying experience to contribute to Flow Lab.
The team was especially supportive and gave us all the freedom we needed to navigate through our research. We are both really thankful for David Jacob’s insights during our everyday morning standups.
And we consider us lucky to meet numerous captivating persons we encountered during the user's interviews.
The key learning of this project?
Make decisions based on data and not on intuition. By going through interviews and tests before iterating, we create a user-oriented solution that is not biased by our own preferences.
