Siddha Meditate
Siddha Meditate is a platform for building a habit of meditation with on-demand classes you can schedule and time-block into your calendar. I played a key role in facilitating its design and brand strategy.
Background
Siddha Meditate, launching Spring 2024, makes building healthy habits of meditation with ease. Bringing meditation classes curated to your preferences, while also enabling you to preschedule your classes and time-block them right into your busy schedule. Whether you’re juggling meetings between work, a mom on the go, or a student trying to find zen between classes and tests, Siddha Meditate helps you fit meditation into your schedule.
Tools
Figma, Zeplin, Jira, Adobe illustrator
My role
Solo designer of Siddha Meditates iOS application and responsive website platform, working closely with two founders, a creative marketing team, and a team of 7+ developers.
Objectives
The why
How might we design a product that can help busy people create new daily habits to support their health and well being?
Since the start of the pandemic, people have been looking for ways to ease their stress and promote a healthy lifestyle. The demand for mindfulness apps is growing every year. According to Google, the number of searches for yoga and meditation apps like ‘yoga for beginners app’ and ‘mindfulness apps’ increased by 65%. While the demand may be increasing, actually being able to make those habits stick, is another story. According to this study, the failure rate of making a new habit stick is as high as 88%.
Research
A healthy life style starts with a single healthy habit.
I first joined Siddha Meditate as their Sole UX Designer on a small but mighty team. In the peak of the pandemic, it was clear that people wanted to create a healthy lifestyle. Siddha Meditate started with the idea of an all-in-one healthy lifestyle platform with a holistic approach to forming healthy habits. This would include classes in fitness, nutrition, and meditation. To assist users in creating healthy habits, they would be able to schedule each of these classes right into their personal calendars so they can time-block these daily rituals. We wanted to focus on a product that would take the stress and mental load out of trying to create a new habit into their daily life, so users can incorporate these habits stress-free with ease and spend more time enjoying life and building habits.
In search of the MVP- Yoga, Nutrition, or Meditation?
As we began constructing information architecture with site maps and user flows, we ran into one constraint: the vast amount of features to include in the platform could take years to reach fruition. We needed to decide on the MVP- Most Viable Product for first launch.
The platform had 6 main components: 3 Classes (Fitness and Yoga, Nutrition, and Meditation), a Calendar scheduling feature, a store with products to assist in fitness and healthy habits, and a social feature to connect with other users using the platform.
The first decision to narrow down the MVP was to cut away the store and the social feature. These could come later once there is a larger user base established.
The next decision was the narrow down the classes, and only focus on one of the features. Fitness and Yoga, Nutrition, or Meditation? We came to a conclusion:
The Yoga market is very saturated. Hundreds of yoga and fitness apps can be found in the app store which would mean more competition.
The Nutrition market is still very new. There isn’t a large user base.
The Meditation market is growing rapidly, and the competition was very low.
This led us to define the MVP for the first launch: A focused meditation app with a time-blocking feature to schedule classes right into your calendar.
Today, the number of people who meditate globally is estimated to be anywhere between 200 and 500 million.
With more people realizing just how effective meditation is to overall wellbeing, it is no surprise that more people are willing to engage in the practice.
Design process
Visualizing Solutions
Information architecture
After gathering data, I wanted to explore the design and flow of the platform. The platform will have 4 main sections: Log in and Onboarding, Home/ Browse, Calendar, and My Practice/ Settings
Visual Design
The vision of the founders is a sleek and modern design. Think: Apple with its use of grey scale and minimal colors. Alo Moves with its use of menus, minimal color, and simple design. Clean simplicity and usability of Calendly. Siddha Meditate has a goal of bringing meditation into the corporate world, with the design language leading the pack.
Sleek. Modern. Upscale. Clean.
Design exploration
My goal was to create a simple, informative, and reliable experience that would empower users to take ownership of their schedules and habit building, with a streamlined process of finding meditation classes to fit their needs, and also seamlessly adding classes into their calendar without having to spend too much time thinking.
By closely working with the founders, as well as the development team, I went through rapid design iterations to clean up the interface and map out component behaviors.
One feature that went through many iterations due to it being a more novel feature, was the “Add to Calendar” feature. The founders wanted users to be able to filter through classes, find classes quickly and easily, and add it into their schedule, all at once. The initial designs had these actions all on one page. The final design included splitting these actions up into two parts, first finding the class, and then scheduling it. This also enabled the screen for scheduling the class to be used when the user wants to add a class to the calendar directly from the class page, which keeps consistency across the platform.
Deliverables
Final Designs
Browsing classes
Users can browse classes on the home page. They can scroll the home page and find classes curated for them based on preferences and watch history, find classes split by category, look through class collections, and browse the teachers. Users can also filter or search for specific classes. Once they choose a class, they select the duration of how long they would like to meditate, and they can begin their meditation right away, or schedule it into their calendar for later.
Calendar
At the calendar, users can see all view- all the classes they have scheduled, day view- look at everything in their calendar for the day, or month view. Users can also add classes to their calendar by using the add to calendar feature, and select classes through the filter and add directly to their calendar. Users are limited to adding to their schedule up to 7 days in advanced at max, which enforces users to get on the app weekly to create their meditation schedule to assist habit building.
My Practice
In My Practice, users can view their stats and access the Settings, as well as view their favorites, their class notes, their badges, and watch history.
Website
The platform has a desktop version as well. I utilized mobile-first design to design desktop pages for every screen, and the mobile website for users that don’t have an Apple phone, and may access the platform through their mobile phone.
The website features a full landing page for new users that want to learn more about the platform, view plans, and see some of its features. Users can also access all the same meditation classes as in the app, and also access their calendar and settings.
Final Thoughts
This project was challenging in that there were many technical details and unique constraints I had to wrap my head around. It enabled me to go through the entire design process, from conception and research, to communicating with developers and completing quality assurance. I learned a lot throughout the process, including constraints when building an iOS app for the Apple store. I also learned a lot about my own personal design process. I learned how important feedback is from everyone on the team, and what to do with the feedback. I learned I am an advocate for users, for accessibility when it comes to my designs, and empathetic when it comes to hearing feedback. Finally, I learned A LOT about the benefits of meditation, behaviors in which people meditate, and habit-forming practices.
This was truly a rewarding experience, and look forward to seeing it in the App Store Spring 2024!