Hackathon / Ponder
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Problem: Traditional meditation apps like Headspace and Calm offer pre-generated meditations that are generic, repetitive, and costly.
Solution: Ponder is an AI powered meditation app that seeks to personalize meditation journeys and cater meditations to the user’s emotional state and preferred techniques.
My Role: I designed all the mobile mock-ups, user flows, and brand design system.
Devpost Submission: https://devpost.com/software/ponder-ai-powered-meditation
Update (January 2024): Our team launched the beta app for iOS!
RESEARCH
Given the limited timeframe of a 36-hour hackathon, there wasn’t enough time to conduct extensive research. However, one of our team members, Sebastian, had been practicing meditation for over 6 years, so we interviewed him to identify his key pain points.
Pain Points:
- Pre-generated meditation sessions and courses are generic
- The same meditations grow repetitive and boring
- High subscription fees for meditation apps
How might we help people who regularly practice meditation discover meditations relevant to their current emotional needs?
IDEATION
During the ideation phase, our team brainstormed many innovative features to include in our meditation app. However, we needed to prioritize the most essential features and user interactions for the initial prototype presented to the hackathon judges.
We split up our list of features into must-haves and nice-to-haves, taking into account development time and feasibility for each feature.
Must-have features:
- Personalized Meditation
- Challenges
- Journals
Nice-to-have features:
- User profile
- Goals, achievements, stats
- Session feedback
- Communities
- Courses
Wireframes
EXPLORATIONS
Onboarding - Light Mode
I suggested to create onboarding screens to introduce users to our app and its core features. This was the first iteration going from wireframe to basic UI, and I was still exploring different colour palettes and branding style.
Later on, I swapped the light mode for dark mode as I thought it would better suit the theme of “meditation” and induce visual comfort and relaxation. I also edited the original copy by condensing the amount of text to avoid overwhelming users.
Question Prompts - Multiple Choice
I designed a few different templates for the guided meditation question prompts, but ultimately went with another design entirely (which you’ll see in the final designs) to accommodate for custom user input as a choice option.
Weekly Challenges - Challenge Prompts
FINAL DESIGNS
Visual Identity
Onboarding
Guided Meditation (Core Feature)
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Login & Signup
Work In Progress Designs
Prototype
Click here to see the Figma prototype
MY IMPACT
- Shipped full end-to-end flow within a 36-hour hackathon, collaborating with developers from ideation, design, to execution.
- Defined core product features and cohesive branding.
- Reduced user friction by opting for a clean and minimalist UI design.
LEARNINGS
Getting to work on a tangible app from start to finish was an exhilarating experience, but it didn’t happen without challenges.
The limited timeframe put pressure on us to work in an efficient manner while having good communication and collaboration. To ensure a smooth design to development handoff, I gave my developers a Figma essentials tutorial to understand how to navigate the tool and I provided verbal walkthroughs of my mock-ups with reasoning to support my design decisions.
If I had more time, I would have done further initial research in the form of user interviews, surveys, and secondary research to identify in-depth insights from a larger and diverse sample size. To address the pain point of expensive subscription costs for meditation apps, we would be able to keep costs low by using AI technology to generate new meditations. This would reflect in the pricing strategy of the app if it were to be officially released to the market.
Post-hackathon, my team continues to collaborate on the development of Ponder, and our goal is to finalize the minimum viable product (MVP) in late 2024!
