PAUSE • An app for stress management at work

 

00 • OVERVIEW

The challenge was to develop a wellness-related mobile product that improves users’ mental, physical, or emotional well-being.

  • The solution had to be a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of an app that focuses on one aspect of wellness that the designer considers important (backed up by user research).

  • The tool should keep track of the users’ progress.

Scope & Constraints

The timeline for this project was 8 working days (+1 week-end day) and we had to work in pairs. I had the pleasure to work with Marine, an incredibly organized and efficient team player 💫

We started organizing as a team by creating a Team Canvas, in order to make sure our work was productive, happy and stress-free. We also organized our time from the beginning into sections thanks to Trello, by decomposing all the tasks we had to perform for this project in the allocated time.

The first 5 days were focused on UX (empathize, define & beginning of ideation stage), and the remaining time mostly on UI (ideation, prototyping & testing iterations)

01 • RESEARCH

➔ Market Analysis Insights

Our market analysis showed that a huge amount of people are living with stress daily.

We studied papers regarding stress factors and how people dealt with them, as well as the main techniques used to relieve stress.

Another interesting insight was that young generations are more stressed than in the past : 46% of 24–34 years old say that their stress level increased over the past three years versus only 30% of the 65 years old and more.

*according to a survey conducted by Opinion Way in October 2017, conducted on a sample of 1017 people representative of the French population

 

➔ User Research

Survey (113 respondents)

Our survey’s main purpose was to identify people’s stressors and examine if there were any patterns in their responses. That’s why we created questions about the main stress causes & coping techniques.

We received 113 responses, and one of the most noteworthy conclusions was that the two primary sources of stress are work (68,1%) and interpersonal interactions (37,2%).

Also, 78,8% of our respondents considered being stressed at least from time to time and 93,7 % said that stress had an impact on their daily life.

Among the stress management techniques the most commonly used, breathing exercises came at the top with 49,9% of respondents.

User Interviews

We conducted 5 user interviews to validate our assumptions and the data we gathered thanks to market research and survey.

The topics that came back often were :

not having tools to manage stress, its impact on health, fear of judgement on telling about it, communication difficulties, social interactions at the workplace, time management as well as handling change.

« My boss used to put a lot of pressure on me, because of short deadlines. One day, during a meeting, I started crying. »
— C.
« I don’t have any technique or tool on what to do to control my stress level. I wish I had discrete and quick tips  »
— M.
« I fear not to have an appropriate reaction to my interlocutor, especially in a strong emotional situation.
Overall, I fear to hurt others. »
— T.

➔ Competitors’ analysis

We conducted a competition study to gain a better understanding of the market.

This revealed market gaps as well as congested areas: we found many meditation apps, journaling apps, some breathing apps, but none of them were tailored to users’ needs, and none of them addressed how to handle difficult or stressful discussions, which was a need our users had.

 

Thanks to an Affinity Map, we succedeed in clustering all our Research findings in groups and drawing powerful insights : pain points and design opportunities.

Then, doing an Empathy Map helped us align on a deep understanding of end users.

02 • DEFINITION

Thanks to all these steps, Emma, our user persona, was born.

Emma is a young professional that often feels stressed at work, mainly because of social interactions with her manager & she needs a quick solution to help.

Her typical journey would be coming to work, her boss giving her a lot to do in with a very short deadline, which creates stress. She doesn’t really know how to speak with her manager about it and feels helpless. She is unable to manage her stress or change the situation since she lacks the necessary tools.

 

Problem Statement

Young professionals need to find a way to quickly reduce their stress at their workplace because it affects them physically and they want to feel better fast so that it does not impact their personal life

03 • IDEATION

We combined user insights with market analysis and came up with lots of ideas. We prioritized on our ideation results using a Moscow matrix and some HMW statements.

  • How might we help workers to be stressless ?

  • How might we make the workplace less stressful ?

  • How might we help young workers feel better on their workplace ?

  • How might we help people not be sick because of stress ?

  • How might we quickly reduce stress?

  • How might we make stress not affect personal life ?

We also conducted a Subject Matter Expert (SME) inteview with a researcher in Psychology who validated our concept on the user side.

 
 
 

Solution & Value Proposition

Create an app in order to help people prepare for stressful discussions at work;

  • Give personalized tips regarding the person you need to talk to and the topic

  • Offer breathing exercises in addition to it, to get physically prepared

 

User Flow

 
 
 

04 & 05 • PROTOTYPING & TESTING

Throughout the project, we tested our concept and our prototypes and obtained great input at each stage. That helped us for incremental enhancements. Each test helped us develop our concept and design, while also ensuring that it met the demands and aims of our users.

Low-fidelity screens

We started handdrawing our lo-fi wireframes with pen & paper, by using the Crazy 8’s method to generate as many screen design ideas as possible.

User Concept Testing made us change the way we displayed the features and adjust our lo-fi at least three times.

Mid-fidelity screens

Here are our first mid-fi wireframes version, after having redefined our MVP and Emma’s userflow;

Thanks to Usability Testing, we were able to improve wordings and to cluster some screens, for instance our homepage.

 

  • Moodboard

    We created our moodboard with the will to balance stress at work with an uplifting, calm and kind visual identity that would give confidence and empower our users.

    We decided to create our branding lines, by finding a name as well as a logo for the app.

  • Style Tile

    For the logo, we used some simple organic shapes that would bring softness, used the colors we extracted from our moodboard and brainstormed about a simple and global name that would represent well our concept. We voted on “PAUSE”, because of the idea of giving a break to our user in his stressful working day.

 

High-fidelity screens

 
 
 
 

High Fidelity Prototype

 
 
 

Desirability Testing

With our high-fidelity prototype, we also ran a desirability test, and the primary attributes that people chose were Accessible, Friendly, and Easy to use, which represented in a good way what we were attempting to achieve.

Outcomes & lessons

 

Being organized is the answer to a lot of difficulties — we let a day free of tasks in order to predict the lag and that allowed us to work hard day by day, but with serenity.

Testing is key ! It is essential for a product this young to have many rounds of testing in order to discover any problems before development and to establish product-market-fit. Between the very first lo-fi model and the latest version of the prototype, there is a whole world!