Gayiti

An Advanced meditation application with anticipatory learning technology and bluetooth capability.

Gayiti is an iOS app that hopes to motivate users to continue their spiritual journey by encouraging users to take a moment to improve their mental wellness.

My Role

Team: 3 UX designers including myself.

My Role: Product Management, Ideation, Interviews, Competitive and comparative analysis, Usability Testing, Copywriting

Created the daily development agenda, and used a journal to document the entire process.
Constant communication with the primary stakeholder, Scarlett.
Decided which tools would best fit the scope of the project (Sketch, Trello, Photoshop, Journals)
Using the information collected from the team, decided which features would make the MVP
Organized the stakeholder briefing meeting.
Conducted formal user research interviews, and usability testing.

Goals

External Stakeholder/client: Create an application that pairs with a bluetooth bracelet which will help people meditate.

Designers: Research the user base to find out habits around meditation and where an app may fit in to solve a problem.

User Research

2 rounds of User Interviews
- ROUND 1: 25 Qs, 20-50 mins, 8 participants
- ROUND 2: 12 Qs, 15-30 mins, 5 participants
Interviews conducted in person, on the phone, and via video chat

We synthesized user research from interviews into two personas:

Bruce, a novice meditator, and
Lilac, an advanced meditator.

Product Research

After conducting research into the product space via competitive / comparative analysis, I led the team to create a MoSCoW map in order to decide on features.

Insights

Why people don’t meditate:

Lack of knowledge
Lack of motivation
Lack of accountability
Lack of time

Why people meditate:

Cope
Manifest goals
Reflect and grow
Relax

Problem Statement

People want to increase their mental and spiritual wellness by meditating, but struggle to be consistent in their practice. How might we encourage a more habitual meditation practice?

Key Features

Evolution

Scaled down client’s ideas to match needs of user by making the bluetooth connection an add-on feature instead of a staple feature. This decreases production cost for client and application cost for user. It also allows business to reap extra revenue if customer buys add on, and gives customer more choice which increases motivation.
Changed from pure time based meditation reminders to location based reminders based on feedback from users that said they often ignore alarms, and have trouble fitting meditation into their busy schedule. Location based reminders allows Gayiti to send users reminders based on their movement and location (sitting still at home for a long period of time may warrant a push notification).
Designed home page based on ideas from client (mood boards, drawings, discussion) and tied this with designer ideas. Client wanted a pretty, interactive homepage and designers wants a home page that prompted users to interact with app.
Usability tests allows us to see where changes needed to be made. Users were able to complete tasks in over half the amount of time from our first rounds of testing to our last. In addition, verbal feedback from users was extremely positive and excited during our last round of testing.

Takeaways

Always keep a central location for documents and assets that everyone on the team has access to
Keep a daily record of progress and discussion items
Hold regular meetings with team and client to ensure visions
and ideas align