Finding meaning in self-care
How can we motivate users to prioritize their wellbeing?
Project Overview
Uimi is a wellness app that helps people find meaning in self-care
Responsive health and wellbeing portal where goodness-conscious individuals can log in to record their physical and mental health information, as well as access activities, routines, and meditations to actively nurture self-care behaviors.
This end-to-end project was completed for the Careerfoundry UX Design course.
Role
UX/UI designer
User researcher
Duration
6 months
Tools
Figma
Google Slides
Google Forms
Usability Hub (now Lyssna)
OptimalSort
The Problem
People get overwhelmed and lose motivation to achieve their health goals.
I've seen many people — including friends, family, and strangers — give up on their health goals. I wanted to get to the root of why it's so hard to stay motivated, then figure out a solution that circulates inspiration for people.
The Opportunity
Find a way to help users continually nurture their wellbeing.
Hypothesis:
People trying to make positive wellbeing changes need a way to receive structured and tailored support while they track their mental and physical health because they can easily get overwhelmed and lose motivation.
We will know this to be true when we see users successfully establish healthier lifestyle changes and attain a more organized understanding of their health.
The Solution
Uimi — a wellness app that helps people prioritize their wellbeing by finding meaning in self-care.
Structuring self-care via routines and activities
Create a new routine
Create new routines via your home page
Personalize your routine with a unique title and an encouraging message
Add activities and/or a meditation as you see fit
Schedule your routine for your unique lifestyle
Engage in your routine
Engage in your routine from Home or your Library
Tap activities to mark them as complete
Completed routines are marked in your Library / Home daily
Discover and save self-care activities
Explore the Discover page to find new self-care routines, activities, and meditations
Implement recommended activities
Discover activities by category or by searching
Save your favorites to your library or recommend to your friends
The Thought Process
Is there space in the highly saturated wellness app market?
Initially, I wasn't sure exactly how I would differentiate myself from the many pre-existing wellness apps marketplace. After analyzing apps targeted towards physical and mental wellbeing, I discovered that users have to revert to using multiple apps to track or achieve niche subjects, such as period tracking, meditations, moods, etc. I hypothesized that an all-in-one app could reduce the mental overload for users, potentially increasing their ability to stay motivated.
✍🏻
Competitor apps largely lack effective support for those who struggle with motivation and accountability.
Who are my users, and what are their approaches to wellness and mindfulness?
At this point, I had a good jumping off point for what I might need to target in creating this wellness app… But how niche of an audience do I have? Who would benefit from another wellness app? To validate my initial research and better understand how my users approach wellness. I conducted user surveys with 20+ participants.
User Surveys
22 survey participants
✍🏻
Over 70% of participants did not have experience with mindfulness apps (eg Headspace, Calm). Their patterns show that they do not prioritize or understand mindfulness although they say they care.
“I don’t know how mindfulness works”
- Kevin
“Filling out info on health apps everyday is stressful and overwhelming”
- Tiffany
“I’m too busy to meditate”
- Jenny
I learned that no matter if the participants were interested in mindfulness or not, they were all struggling in some way. And upon analyzing my data, I could see an overarching theme:
✍🏻
Users felt like wellness apps require too much effort to keep up with.
3 out of 4 users lose motivation easily, with or without apps!
Only 30% of my survey pool had experience with mindfulness apps, so I did not get much insight into the frustrations behind using them. To supplement this survey, I would ideally follow up with another focus group survey to get a better understanding.
💡
How can we support users in implementing self-care into their lifestyles?
At this point, the wheels were turning and it was time to dig deeper. I now knew that my users get stressed by requirements to track wellness every day, and that while many highly value mindfulness, they don't prioritize it. I wanted to understand if self-care could be the answer to help users in their journey to be more mindful, so I conducted user interviews.
User Interviews
4 interview participants
Analyzing the Data…
After the interviews, I affinity mapped the participants’ responses (140+ data points) to break down and uncover common frustrations, needs, goals, behaviors, and attitudes.
Insights and Possible Solutions
It turns out that my users all highly value self-care and have their own methods of self-care, whether it be skin-care 🧼, napping 💤, or games 🎮, but still desire a way to better integrate it into their lives. All users have experience with fitness apps but had significantly less experience with mindfulness apps.
These interviews indicated a common theme of separating the mind and body. However, in reality, numerous scientific studies have examined and revealed the close connection of the mind and body, such as how the hormones and neurotransmitters associated with emotion can also have physical effects.
I synthesized a few different solutions and eventually narrowed down the 4 main themes that would drive the app’s key features. The possible solutions I came up with are rooted in mental wellbeing, as attitude is proven to have a strong influence on behaviors.
Based on my research, I added the following to my hypothesis.
💡
Attitude is proven to have a strong influence on behaviors.
If people feel safe to practice compassion towards themselves, even during hard times, they’re more likely to keep up self-care regularly.
I really enjoyed conducting the interviews and getting a deeper insight into a wider range of perspectives. Diving deep to understand people's thought patterns taught me a lot about my own, too.
I’m excited to improve my interview skills with more practice!
How might my users interact with this app?
Creating personas to focus on their needs and goals
Flowing June's and Alex's journeys through the app
How would June and Alex move through the app I'm building? What would get them excited, bring them peace, or peeve them off? Would they wake up and use it right away? Once a day? Nonstop? Mapping out their mood journeys brought me so many ideas on how to make this app fresh and useful.
Step by step, I turned the journeys into flows. As much as I wanted to design everything I was conceptualizing, I knew I had to focus on the MVP and the actual frames I would need to build.
Structuring the Information Architecture
Stepping back to create a sitemap from scratch was harder than I thought it would be. There were so many pages to connect to each other, and so many different ways for June and Alex to complete their tasks. I conducted card sorting with 5 participants to validate the sitemap I first created. As I used a free site, I was limited in the number of topics I could create. This led to confusion and skewed results, so moving forward, investing in this process would be necessary for deeper insights and clearer data. Looking back, even after iterating a couple times, I would expect to continue tweaking and cleaning up the sitemap after usability testing.
Visually designing the solution
Progressing human insight and research data into a warm and inviting experience
Quickly getting the ideas out of my head
Because I had so many ideas, I found myself scribbling low-fidelity wireframes very early on in the research process to get them visually down on paper. After defining the sitemap, I gathered my excitement, referred back to my user research, and focused my designs down to four main task flows I considered to be most important for new users.
Create an account / log in (Onboarding)
Discover and save activities
Create a new routine
Engage in one of your routines
Prototyping for functionality
Paper wireframes turned into prototypes to progress the flows I had designed earlier. I continued to iterate the designs from low to mid to black and white high-fidelity, at which point I would I made a few rounds of iterations based on feedback from the usability tests, preference testing, calls with my mentor, and peer reviews, as well as changes done in order to meet or exceed accessibility guidelines.
Usability Tests
6 usability test participants, B&W high-fidelity prototype on Figma, moderated remote tests via Zoom
Errors measured with Jakob Nielsen’s scale
I took myself out of my perspective and tested the friction. How could I make this prototype better? Turns out my users were confused and struggling with these key tasks. I grouped my users' observations, errors, positive quotes, and negative quotes then organized the data into a rainbow spreadsheet for further visualization of errors.
“I like that I can add friends”
- KK
“I'm just gonna skip this guide… Ok please help I'm so confused!"
- CT
All 6/6 participants struggled with Task 2: Create a new routine
- Jenny
✍🏻
All participants aimlessly tapped around while creating a routine — while the path was there, it was not intuitive to users and led to increased time spent spent on the task.
I wanted to make this smooth and easy but it was anything but! So I took a period of time to step away, regroup, and review all my research to make the routine creation process more intuitive. The first iteration after the usability testing included in-depth skippable coach marks but I worried it could feel excessive for users. With limited time, I decided to provide simple visuals in the onboarding process, and experimented with how I could make the task more self-explanatory so users wouldn’t have to follow a long tutorial. I also focused on presenting new information at the necessary steps to reduce my users' mental load.
Augmenting the user experience with beauty
The atmosphere for the app that I was now calling Uimi (more on that later) had been ruminating in my brain for a while. I was very excited to finally give my app some character. I wanted to communicate "warmth" using muted but not dull colors. Gentle and friendly fonts characterize the ongoing supportive feeling of Uimi.
Interactions and little joys
I've ooh-ed and ah-ed at so many subtle animations and cute little interactive elements in digital experiences, so I had so much fun bringing some beauty and fun into this app. It was very delightful to leverage familiarity to iterate the interaction design, knowing that unique features like creating a new routine would require some hand-holding for new users.
Final MVP
Uimi — find meaning in self-care.
Uimi means "meaning of gesture, sense of expression, or status of importance" in Korean. With Uimi, you are met where you are and encouraged to build your self-worth. Connect your body and mind with custom self-care routines, loving community support, and personal reflection.
Create an account
Create a new routine
Engage in your routine
Discover and save self-care activities
Takeaways
Create an organization system early on
It’s crucial to stay organized when there is constantly new files, research, and data coming in. It’s also helpful to create a design system earlier on as well.
Research is continuous
I don’t want to say it never ends, as there are deadlines. But I found myself researching continuously at every step of the way. Every problem needed a new solution, and I loved that I didn’t have to rely on my own assumptions to solve them.
Iteration over perfection
This project reinforced how it’s much more important to take in user feedback and evolve the product rather than aim for perfection.
If I had more time…
I would’ve conducted more research! More interviews, more usability tests, more preference testing… Looking back, I would also consider setting specific success/failure metrics during usability testing, such as clicks-per-task or time-per-task.
I’m not satisfied with the buttons - I would like to try out a few more options and test them out with users to get their feedback. The Community feature is the next key feature I would focus on building, as well as the More page. I thought of a few different ideas to expand the customizability of Uimi as well, such as a dark mode, different color modes, higher accessibility versions, and so on.