“Draw me an app.”
My second challenge as a UX/UI Design student at Ironhack was to build an app.
And as the challenge was not big enough, I also had a condition: it had to be a wellness tool. To spice the whole thing up, my mission was to deliver the high-fidelity prototype within two weeks.
As you can imagine, my first reaction when I first heard the guidelines was to freak out. Especially not coming from a Design background, it was quite a hard work.
Although it ended up being indeed very challenging, it was also a lot of fun!
I am lucky to have a yogi family which inspired me what turned out to be my app: Mindfull.
Mindfull aims to be the reference of yoga and meditation retreats’ search tools. Indeed, finding the perfect yoga and meditation retreat is not an easy task, and it’s all based on word to mouth most of the time, which doesn’t give the user any guarantee proof on the retreat they pick.
My Design Sprint started with an intense research and some very worthy interviews.
After questioning both users and professionals in the retreat industry from all over the world about the habits, the positive, and the negative points, I ended up with a quite precise user persona that I named Alice.
Please meet Alice M. :
Alice helped me coming with the following problem statement:
“Young urban professionals living in big cities don’t have time to look up the best reviewed retreats on the internet for long hours.”.
After coming up with this problem statement I could decide on the hypothesis statement which was:
“If yoga and meditation adepts are unhappy with their choices of retreats, they should find a retreat that match their needs based on their profile”.
Thus, I came up with Alice’s user journey :
Alice’s journey is typical from a mid-30’s Parisian working in the corporate world. She wakes up early, goes to work, gives it all until very late, then comes home, has a quick dinner, is too tired to function and falls asleep watching Netflix with her partner. She even skips her yoga class sometimes! Bad karma.
As you can imagine, such a lifestyle leaves very few space for Internet benchmark, especially when you’re always confronted with very extreme retreats offers going from Ayahuesca experiences to living in the trees for a week, and you can’t find your way in this wild world.
Alice just wants a nice get-away where she could practice some yoga and meditate with professionals.
After having a more precise idea of how I could help that poor woman, I came up with a site-map and a few user flows that I low-fi prototyped armed with my white paper and my sharpie.
After testing my favourite user flow with my teachers, my TA’s, my classmates and anyone that was crossing my path that day, I had a lot of modifications to do but I eventually came up with the perfect mid-fi for Alice.
Once tested and feedbacks taken into consideration, I came up with a moodboard in order to build my high-fidelity prototype.
I wanted to pick light colors with shades of grey, pearl and pink to match with the theme.
Also for my design system I chose to use rounded buttons for the app to be less sharp-looking.
This is a recording of my main user flow which is my persona, Alice, booking a retreat in France according to her profile:
I hope you liked my first attempt at designing an app!
