Lumenate
An onboarding journey for new users to reduce the drop off rate and help customers incorporate Lumenate into their routines.
Summary
Welcome to the UX / UI Design project on the mobile app Lumenate, a semi-psychedelic meditation app.
Their mission is to make subconscious exploration more accessible.
By using the torch on the back of a phone, a dark room and music, Lumenate guides you into a deep meditative state.
Team roles
Working in a team of 4, we used the Kanban method and agreed to work collaboratively on this project, which allowed us to be equally involved in the end-to-end process and enabled continuous communication and alignment.
I conducted user interviews and usability testing and was massively involved in the wireframe and prototype tasks.
Due to my experience, I was nominated to lead all the communication with the client, particularly meetings and the design studio session.
Deliverables
User interviews, competitive analysis, personas, affinity mapping, problem statement, How Might We, user journey, design studio, user flow, Lo and Hi-Fi wireframes, iterations, design system, Hi-Fi prototype, usability testing.
Tools
Problem
A large proportion of customers are dropping off before getting to the point of incorporating Lumenate into their lives and, as a result, they are not experiencing the full benefit that the app has to offer.
Goals
1.
To increase the benefit experienced by our customers by helping them to incorporate Lumenate into their lives successfully.
Solution
Introduction of the onboarding “Welcome Journey” for new users, which will guide them through a new meditation technique. Upon completion, users get to use 3 sessions from paid content.
We believed this solution could help in two different ways:
The first was with drop-off, as the welcome journey helped incentivise the user to continue using the app for longer.
The second was providing new users with more guidance so that there was an increased chance they experienced the benefits of Lumenate and integrated the app into their routine naturally.
2.
To suggest UX improvements within the app. This was a lower priority but something to focus on, nonetheless. We saw this as an opportunity to find quick wins for Lumenate: low effort, high impact.
Solution
Improve the Journal feature, as well as the app accessibility in terms of contrast, font size and spacing between elements.
Discover
After dismantling the brief into pieces, we put together a list of requests for the client: Analytics data, additional questions and creative assets.
We then rolled our sleeves because we had no time to waste.
Research
Lumenate had also conducted user research, most recently with churned users, which gave us a good picture of at what stage and why users were cancelling their subscription.
Where?
After sign-up and before the completion of the demo session.
The second drop-off point was before the completion of the first session.
Why?
There were a number of reasons users were cancelling, but the two most common reasons were lack of content and lack of usage which, again, gave us areas of focus for our research.
After going through the data, doing competitive analysis and having a play around with the app, we were starting to realise just how different the appeal of Lumenate was.
User interviews
When putting together our research plan, we realised that we needed to understand both Lumenate users in-depth, as well as users of other health and wellbeing apps, as they could provide valuable insights.
We also set up clear goals:
Lumenate app users
To find out what makes Lumenate users subscribe to a plan and their expectations.
To flag anything users enjoyed about the app, and things they found frustrating, keeping our secondary objective from the brief in mind.
Health & Wellbeing app users
To understand what other apps do to create habit-forming.
At this point, we were ready to go full steam ahead with our 9 Zoom interviews: 6 Lumenate users and 3 Health and Wellbeing app users.
Affinity Mapping
With our interviews done, we went crazy with our affinity mapping loaded with post-it notes to find trends (don’t worry, we used Figjam… save the trees!)
Lumenate app users
Health & Wellbeing app users
Shared trends
Define
With our research phase over, two personas were born. Please, meet Ralph and Georgie!
Ralph, Secondary persona
Ralph loved the app’s benefits and simply wanted improved functionality. Lumenate was already part of his routine, he just wished the journal feature and the reminders were better developed.
Problem statement
Ralph needs a flexible way to journal his thoughts and moods, so that he can edit and track his progress and mental journey clearly.
How Might We
Help Ralph to track and edit his moods and feelings by using a more user-friendly journaling?
We created Ralph to represent the UX changes we would make for the secondary objective. It was useful to have a persona to empathise with when thinking about our design choices.
Georgie, Primary persona
Georgie was a traditional meditation app user who wanted to get the full experience of the Lumenate app but just didn’t know how. Georgie wants to learn new meditation techniques but needs more guidance otherwise, she will forget about the app.
Problem statement
Georgie needs to organically understand Lumenate through better guidance so that she can explore the full benefits of new meditation techniques, and seamlessly integrate the app into her routine.
How Might We
Seamlessly introduce Georgie to a new meditation technique and encourage her to make it part of her routine?
Being our Primary persona, our focus was on Georgie’s problem and how could we help her.
Develop
Design Studio
As the person with more experience in the team, I was selected to lead the Design Studio session with the Lumenate team composed of the CEO, the Design Lead and the Product & Design Advisor.
We started by making sure that both the problem statement and “How Might We” were clear and that we were all aligned in terms of business and user needs.
We put pen to paper and did 2 rounds of sketching, which helped narrow down which features we wanted to focus on.
(Enjoy everyone’s Bob Ross design skills!)
Three ideas came out of the session:
1.
Instructional content during onboarding.
2.
Integrating a welcome journey into the app.
3.
An improved reminder / notification system.
Lo-Fi wireframes
With a solid plan in place, we got our heads down and built our user flow, followed by the low-fidelity prototype.
Lo-Fi usability testing
We conducted 6 usability tests for our Lo-fi prototype: 4 in person and 2 via zoom.
Our goal for these tests was to identify any major issues with our flow and to confirm that our solution made sense.
We uncovered many interesting pain points by keeping a close eye on our users' behaviour and struggles throughout the tests.
Type of sessions:
Users were confused and anxious by the choice between guided and open sessions.
Locks meaning:
Users didn’t understand the locks and gravitated towards the free content even when they had reward sessions available.
Alarming copy:
Are you sure?... Are you really sure? 100% certain?
Icons:
Didn’t bring enough clarity to the user.
Confusing copy:
How many free sessions are left?
Once testing was completed and the iterations were done, we started focusing on User Interface and building the high-fidelity wireframe.
User Interface
We had 3 areas of focus for our UI design.
1.
Stay true to Lumenate’s design system.
2.
Improve accessibility.
3.
Improve alignments and space between elements.
Setting these rules laid the foundations for our hi-fi design, and once finished, we moved to testing again.
Hi-Fi usability testing
For our high fidelity usability tests, we conducted 8 via zoom and 2 in person, and this time we asked for feedback regarding the design of the screens.
Iterations
Before
“What does it mean Access Everything?”
After
Improved button copy resulted in the user knowing where they were, what was coming next and how to leave the page.
Before
“Is this a button?”
After
Achieved more clarity by adding micro-copy and variations to the static and scroll UI elements.
Before
“What’s my reward?”
“How can I use it?”
After
By adding a new screen we were able to provide closure on the Welcome journey, reminding the user of the reward and how to use it.
Deliver
Our final solution was split into 2 flows:
1.
An onboarding welcome journey for Georgie, guiding her through her first sessions, resulting in a reward of paid content to try out.
2.
Our second flow was for Ralph; we improved the journal feature so he could easily note his feelings and thoughts.
Next steps
We put together a list of recommendations for Lumenate’s next steps:
Test the latest Hi-fi iteration;
A/B test the type of session on step 2 of the welcome journey: Guided or Open session?
Test the new journal flow and design;
Improve Information Architecture with card sorting.
Key learnings
Communication is key. On a project with several people involved, clear and constant communication is fundamental, not only with the team but also with the client and the users. Setting expectations and ensuring we’re all working towards the same goals is important.
Be agile, flexible and listen to everyone’s opinions. As a team, we spent a lot of time discussing ideas which not always all agreed with. Clearly explaining the logic behind those ideas, being open to considering other opinions and accepting that what’s best for both the user and the business isn’t always what you initially assumed is part of the key to delivering a successful solution.
Listen to your users, they know the product better than anyone. Interesting key findings came up from our User Interviews. For example, the journal functionality, which wasn’t mentioned in the brief, was a feature that Lumenate users would love to see improved.
Have fun and enjoy the process! Of course, there were ups and downs throughout the sprint, especially when working on such a short deadline. But, enjoying the journey and believing in our decisions made such a difference in our ways of working and, ultimately, in our final solution.
