brief — 

How can Headspace meet the mental health and mindfulness needs of college students?

Headspace is a mindfulness meditation app with millions of users in more than 190 countries and one mission: to improve the health and happiness of the world. Their goal with this consulting project is to increase college student usage and asked our team to understand the mindfulness practices of college students and brainstorm new features and business strategies.

market research — 

77% of UC Berkeley students reported moderate to high stress.

General Mental Wellbeing Survey (UC Berkeley Students)

• 128 responses

• Publicized in a variety of club Slacks, Major-specific FB Groups, Year-specific FB Groups, in various classes.

Headspace Case Study (Volunteers)

• Checked in with 15 students for 4+ weeks on their Headspace usage and experiences

• Note: can’t disclose case study findings in too much detail

key insights from the survey — 

The pandemic is changing how people destress.

Because of the pandemic and also the wildfires in California (fall 2020), many students can no longer turn to the same outlets they did before, which were hanging out with friends, exercising, listening to music, and hobbies. However, people were still turning to outlets that they could do individually.

Student life has moved online and onto Zoom, taking away the common outlet of grabbing food or hanging out with friends and replacing it with Zoom fatigue. Below are some more key insights.

the problem, defined — 

Users mainly struggle with incorporating Headspace in their routine and consistently using it.

From our research, we found that there were plenty of opportunities for Headspace to meet the mental wellbeing needs of college students. However, users rarely fully integrated using Headspace into their routines and consistently used it, citing overwhelming amount of content, lack of socialization features, and difficulty navigating the app as reasons why.

ideation — 

How do we promote de-stressing together so Headspace users feel connected with each other?

Every consultant came up with different ideas for each pain point, and we narrowed it down to 6 and each consultant was assigned a recommendation to prototype.

My recommendation was the ability to share content and the addition of an in-app chat.

mid-fi prototype — 

feedback — 

It’s a step in the right direction, but not quite fostering connections yet.

Our midpoint presentation was well received by the Headspace Research Team who said our ideas aligned closely with the purpose of the app and wanted us to further develop the features of sharing, in-app chat, as well as 2 others (Journaling and Important Dates)

We collected user feedback by sending out video demos of the features. While just being able to share meditations was a step forward in improving the social aspect of Headspace, the primary criticisms were:

• the pre-written message system is too restricting

• and still did not allow users to really check up on each other or connect over mindfulness

iterations — 

What about meditating together?

In addition to user feedback, I worked with Dhaval on competitor analysis of how other mindfulness apps managed socialization. Only one of Headspace’s competitors was found to have a chat feature that was used by a large number of its users, however, after joining public groups ourselves, we realized no one talked in them. Thus, we didn’t think user generated messaging was enough of a change.

To further improve our feature, we wanted to promote actually using the in-app chat in a way that did foster connections group meditation sessions. We also ideated business strategies to market to college students and engage users for retention.