Kindful is an app designed to empower users to engage in acts of kindness within their communities.
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UX & UI Designer
4 weeks
May 2023
Miro
Figma
Github
VS Code
Google Suite
Trello
Kate Arford
Siera Meaux
Derek Lusk
Keauna Lyles
We observed that people enjoy being kind for the sake of being kind and the way that it makes them feel. We also observed that people want to be more kind to others.
How might we increase opportunities that users have to be kind to others?
Kindful is an app designed to empower individuals to effortlessly engage in acts of kindness by connecting them with nearby opportunities, inspiring a ripple effect of positivity in their communities.
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As a group, we used sticky notes in Miro to brainstorm ideas for our final project in our UX/UI Bootcamp. We contemplated an app that helps you adult better, a route planning app for cyclists, but ultimately an app solution that helps increase mindfulness and positivity won out in our dot voting session. This idea was sparked by a conversation with my brother, who while having a crummy day noted that he wished that people were more self-aware and kinder to others.
We initially proposed that our user would be someone who is stressed out and looking for an app that helps them destress and feel more positively about themself and others. This user changed as we dived deeper into our research.
We conducted 5 user interviews and collected 10 survey responses to determine users feelings around kindness and mindfulness. We found that by and large, users do kind things for others for the sake of being kind and because it makes them happy to do so. Additionally, we found that the current app solutions for cultivating kindness and mindfulness are not serving users effectively. Many mentioned using Calm, Headspace and Muse in the past, but not using these apps beyond the trial period.
At this point in our research, we knew we needed to pivot and differentiate our app with the top mindfulness and positivity apps on the market. We conducted a competitor analysis to determine what the other apps are doing right and what is causing their retention issues.
Using insights from our survey responses and interviews, we developed an affinity diagram as a group. Above are our key takeaways from our affinity diagram.
User Insight
People WANT to be more kind.
Our user, who is concerned with people around her, needs a simple and consistent way to be kind to herself and others because she enjoys the feeling she gets from helping other people.
UX Hypothesis
Proximity is important.
People will be kind to members of their community as it is mutually beneficial. The theory of mutualism suggests that people will be kind, even to strangers if they are members of the same group.
To begin ideating, we revisit our user with greater insight. This user felt so different from our proto persona, so we renamed her, aged her up a bit, gave her a new look and adjusted her goals. She still doesn't like the existing positivity and mindfulness apps on the market but her motivation has since changed. She is looking for a solution to cultivate more kindness in her life, because it makes her happy to be kind to others.
At this point in the process our app begun to take shape. Kindful would be an app that provided opportunities for users to engage with their community by completing and requesting acts of kindness. There would be a focus on gaining points and leveling up to encourage users to continue to engage with the app.
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We identified 4 key task flows as a group and each member of the team owned the wireframing process for one of the task flows. I owned the sign up and onboarding screens.
Each member of the team started by creating paper sketches for our assigned task flows. Starting on paper, allowed us to focus on the core aspects of the user experience rather than getting bogged down by visual details. Next, we transferred our ideas to wireframes in Figma so that we could start user tests.
Four usability tests were conducted and had the following success rates.
Though my portion of the task flows had a 100% success rate, there were improvements that could be made. Key takeaways were renaming our “task” page to reflect the primary feature of our app, which is to facilitate acts of kindness. We also needed to further clarify the app concept by adding images and copy to more screens.
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To align on the visual design of our app, we used a shared Pinterest board. It was an easy alignment for us, our shared board quickly showed a theme. We were all drawn to bright and punchy designs with expressive characters interwoven throughout. We used buttons in shades of white and black with heavy outlines and drop shadows to balance the bright colors.
We iterated to high fidelity and then conducted another 4 usability tests.
A big improvement from the 1st round of testing, but there were still small edits we needed to make after testing like ensuring the iOS Home Indicator remained in view at the bottom of each screen.
To announce the launch of our app, Kindful, we launched a marketing landing page to highlight the features of our iOS and Apple Watch apps. Kate owned the prototyping of our landing page and our coding whiz, Siera did an excellent job of implementing a responsive design of her protype.
Since we had a clear visual identity for our app, I owned iterating our mobile prototype to high fidelity and looked to my teammates for feedback, adjustments, and animations. For example, I added the bright shapes to the onboarding screens, Derek added a face to a couple of them. We loved the fun that the characters added, so we continued to add them everywhere. Siera made our splash/loading screen animations. Kate made our point totaling animation and owned bringing the Apple Watch app to high fidelity.
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