The Ritual | UX Design
The Ritual is a wellness app with a focus on self-care tracking and social community. Users are able to log self-care activities, find new ones, and connect with others so that they can feel part of a self-care community at large.
Concept Background
I was inspired to take on a wellness app as a project as wellness and well-being have been at the forefront of people’s minds due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Self-care and mental health go hand in hand so I wanted to try and create an app that could assist people with implementing self-care into their lives and make it a routine.
According to Mental Health America “In 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, 19.86% of adults experienced a mental illness, equivalent to nearly 50 million Americans.”
With not everyone having access to mental health care, self-care is a small way to help people manage larger issues that they might face in their lives every day.
The national institute of mental health states that “When it comes to your mental health, self-care can help you manage stress, lower your risk of illness, and increase your energy.”
While self-care is not a cure for mental illness it can help people to understand their triggers and give them coping techniques to help manage their health.
Problem
People find it hard to commit to self-care to make it part of their everyday lives.
They don't feel like they have time for it in their schedules and want to feel part of a community.
Role
For this project, I was the end-to-end designer. My responsibilities included conducting research, creating personas, wireframing & prototyping as well as visual design and branding.
Solution
Using the double diamond methodology I created an app called the Ritual. The app allows users to log, find and share self-care rituals to build habits around self-care to help improve people's lives.
Tools
Figma
Adobe Suite
Maze
Process & Methods
My design process was guided by the double-diamond method. This was used as a guide for my research and design.
In each stage, various UX research and design techniques were used to solve the problem at hand.
Diamond one focuses’ on UX research and exploration while diamond two is concerned with ideating, prototyping, and testing to find a suitable solution.
Discover
In this phase, I used UX research techniques to uncover the problem my app was trying to solve. To empathize with the user and identify problems in the self-care space user interviews were utilized. At this stage, Competitive analysis was also used to see how others had tried to solve problems in this space.
Define
Once I had completed the user interviews, I used affinity mapping to help me gain insights and see what were trending problems from the users' perspective. This then allowed me to build a persona and identify the problem that I would solve for them.
Before starting to ideate solutions for the problem I came up with a 'problem statement" and a 'how might we?' statement to guide my initial sketching and ideation process.
Problem Statement
The user finds it difficult to commit to self-care in their everyday life because they feel like they don't have time and are doing it alone.
How Might We?
Encourage those on a self-care journey to practice as well as help them to feel like they are part of a community.
Initial Sketches
While the problem statement identified the problem at hand, once the how might we statement was formed this allowed me to move away from identifying problems and rather start to generate solutions.
To start the ideation process sketching was used as a way to brainstorm and generate ideas in a structured way.
Feature Prioritization
Once the initial sketching and ideation had occurred this allowed potential features for the product to emerge. To be able to balance features, functionality, and simplicity feature prioritization was explored using a 2x2 grid.
User Flow
Information architecture was then investigated in the form of a user flow. This allowed me to think critically from the user's perspective and discover potential problems in my flows.
Design
To start creating the blueprint for my app I started to wireframe my ideas based on my research. Wireframing took place from medium to high fidelity to flesh out ideas throughout different stages of the app design.
Branding & Visual Design
To start to build the branding and design for 'The Ritual I started with creating a mood board and picking out some keywords which would lead the design direction.
The logo I created is inspired by the Yin Yang from Ancient Chinese philosophy. The yin-yang shows the balance between two opposites. While we might have to work hard we also have to take time to care for ourselves we can not have one without the other.
The monochromatic color palette chosen allows the app to look cohesive and the cool colors bring a sense of calm to the user. Information architecture was then investigated in the form of a user flow. This allowed me to think critically from the user's perspective and discover potential problems in my flows.
Deliver
From these wireframes, prototypes were made so that usability testing could be performed. This usability testing allowed me to validate, improve and iterate on my designs with the use of real human feedback. The first round of usability testing was done face-to-face using Figma prototypes. Once feedback had been gathered from these and the data gathered and reviewed. Any updates to the app were made and Maze was used to prototype the app.
The following Iterations were implemented based on the feedback provided:
The library icon was changed to a search icon as testing showed that people considered the library more like a search feature that was more universally recognizable.
There was too much scrolling and tapping to choose a self-care ritual this was updated after testing to a grid format which displayed all the rituals at once.
The navigation did not stand out from the background so the color of the navigation bar was changed.
Colors were changed in the app for both accessibility and consistency throughout the app.
Questions for Future Iterations
How might we make the tracking of activities more seamless and automatic?
integrations with health and calendars could assist with this.
How might we encourage users to try new self-care methods they hadn’t tried before?
