Leveling up: The UX & Visual Improvements

Background

Deeply App was released in March 2019, but engagement and retention were low after the first few days. Some people would uninstall the app without even trying out the unique features or meditations it offers. A considerable % of the users who had the app installed on their phone had low activity.

Goal: Improve the User Experience and retention by uncovering user pain points within the app, keeping in mind the cost of developing completely new features.

An experience-driven strategy required us to focus on UX Research Methods first (surveys, emails & user interviews) to uncover the user pain points. We used a operational efficiency strategy to get us closer to our vision in a very resource-constrained environment.

After synthesizing the data, there were several themes that stood out. We prioritized based on the impact and feasibility of each theme. These are the themes that end up being part of the improvements for this version:

To help us visualize and identify the different elements of the process, and the interrelationships among the various steps, we used the diagram flow (previously created for MVP) as a graphical representation of the ecosystem.

PROBLEM 1

Discoverability: Help people to understand the immediate value of the app

We wanted to better understand the experience of first time users with the app. So, we sent out an email to new users that had signed up, asking what they’d hoped to do after downloading and launching the app — the number one question they had was about how to get started meditating. This insight led us to surface appropriate content to support this.

We also ran usability studies which helped us to discover that there was a high interest in features that were not easily discoverable. This led us to highlight features, such as: layering sounds, integration with other services, and the large number of free meditations & music that Deeply has by creating an on-boarding experience.

Why this design?

We kept in mind that developing any new feature has a high cost and takes time, so we decided to use an on-boarding experience because it gives the user a guided introduction to the product, sets up some initial preferences, and points out critical elements in the User Interface. We can also reuse this feature in the future to introduce any new elements/features.

PROBLEM 2

People wanted the ability to manipulate the background music and sounds used because preferences depended on the user’s mood or exercise itself. We created a set of UI controls to provide people the ability to do that.

We explored adding different types of controls to the meditation sessions, such as: giving the ability to modify background color & duration, adding background music & sounds, unguided meditations, and breathing exercises. After we collected user feedback, we prioritized the findings which led us to create easily accessible controls to download meditations, save them as favorites, and move other secondary controls under the “more” menu. We removed the ability for the user to change background colors and animations due to the low interest in these features and/or the high cost of development. We also split unguided, guided meditations, and breathing exercises in order to simplify the interactions.

PROBLEM 3