Overview: An early stage startup brought me onboard to lead their initial UX efforts for the development of a meditation app called Brightmind. We implemented the Google Ventures Sprint process over the course of a couple months that led us to version one of the iOS app.
My role: During the course of three months that I worked at Brightmind I wore many hats, but primarily served as a UX Designer and project manager. I was tasked with understanding the overall landscape, leading ideation sessions, wireframing/prototyping, business assessment and concept validation.
The company had no established process or timeline for the development of their app. The rest of their small team had very minimal design experience in general and relied on me to steer them in the right direction. The work I would lead during my time at the company would serve as the design foundation for their app as they company grew.
During the course of this project, I followed a variation of Google Venture’s Design Sprint ideology. Before we started our sprint schedule, we completed an affinity mapping exercise, a competitive audit, interviewed users and ran few rounds of initial ideation sessions to derive a holistic view of Brightmind and defined our overall vison.
As our vision and requirements began to materialize, I started to create some artifacts that we would be able to use as references during our sprints.
Next, we began to collect insights from users in order to develop user personas that would serve as guides during our design sprints. We had a general idea of what type of meditation enthusiasts would be drawn to an app of this kind and we recruited a handful of participants that I interviewed. Our sessions resulted in three key personas.
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During user research, I learned just how personal and private meditation can be and should be carefully curated for each user. We started to study the different ways that people talk about their practice, both online and offline. We conducted an extensive competitive audit and took inspiration from some companies that are doing specific things very well. After this preliminary work was complete, we followed a design sprint schedule.
Generally the GV Design Sprint methodology is used for rapid iteration during the course of five days. We adapted ours to be two week sprints in which we had specific areas of focus. Below are some of the early wireframes that came out of our sprints.
It was a rewarding opportunity to be a part of an early stage company with a big vision and a noble goal to assist people in improving their spiritual practice of mindfulness. Brightmind arrived in the app store in late 2017 and quickly was placed on Apple's new apps we love list.
Brightmind has been featured in Forbes and Huffington Post and currently has an app store rating of 4.7. It is continually praised and recommended by the meditation community. The review below is a testament to the power of conducting a user centered design process in order to build a product users truly love.
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