Major Project
Mindful [Read more]
Heroshot
Mindful is a service system that helps university students during exam periods to cope with anxiety and perform better through personalized mindfulness practice, including audio, virtual reality, and offline group sessions.
Exam anxiety and meditation
As a student who used to struggle with exam anxiety, I have tried many methods to cope with it. One of the most effective ones is called mindfulness meditation. Research (Zhang,2017) also shows that only a small proportion of university students know what mindfulness is or the benefits of it. Mindfulness(Baike, 2020) involves stopping thinking to observe thoughts and feelings from a distance, without judging them good or bad. It is believed that through self-realization comes professionalism via concentration and self-control. All in all, the designer thinks it is a meaningful area for research and design.
Primary research
This interview aims to find out what kinds of anxiety university students are facing during the exam periods through a storytelling process, including the causes, symptoms, and current strategies of dealing with their anxiety. The interview questions were based on what the research aimed to find out and was modified throughout the process. This second part of the interview aims to identify whether meditation can tackle their pain points in the exam period, which method works best, which method will not work, how much time do they need, where do they take place. This should be qualitative research rather than quantitative research because it is hard to measure how much a student’s grades improved by meditation. It is essential to know that meditation actually helps during the process. Experts in meditation or yoga can be interviewed to find out how to use meditation to improve students’ exam experience from a more professional perspective. Experts like Matt Taylor for Cambridge Mindfulness Coach and yoga teachers at Loughborough University can be chosen as participants. This will happen after interviews with students.
Insights
The persona is a summary of my primary research. In terms of what kinds of meditation students need, there are different time, place, methods preference. Therefore, personalization is essential. There are other critical areas like natural images, guidance, visualization which should be taken into consideration.
Opportunities
Our mindfulness meditation service/product
Helps university students during exam periods
Who want to achieve better performance while maintaining wellbeing
By avoiding an unhealthy coping mechanism or excessive anxiety and stress
And developing a comprehensive meditation service system that enables students to study and rest effectively and communal experience where students can get support form the school or other students
Unlike existing products/services that do not tailor personalized content for students’ needs during the exam period and limited by the traditional forms of meditation.
iterations
A/B evaluation indicates that the satisfaction of the Mindful has improved 9.8% after iterations. This is due to the improvement and reorganization of the user interfaces. As a result of the performance assessment, it was shown that the task time was reduced by 27,9%, which is mainly because of the final journey was simplified in order to show the machine learning progress. Moreover, task completion increased to 90%. The designer aims to create a user journey of the least resistance and minimal design for the students. Moreover, lostness was decreased. Although we might consider that the redesign includes a much clearer user journey, it showed that the final version of Mindful is more usable than the original one. Therefore, it will improve the efficiency of using the service and make users happier. All in all, it was shown that the usability issues found in expert reviews were mostly improved. In the satisfaction assessment, the results showed that the user was more confident and less confused when using the mobile app.
VR
Visual design
The whole system is based on natural images, and it’s a central theme of the mindfulness practice. Moreover, mainly, the home pages use the autumn leaves to have a consistent look which reflects the theme colour orange. Moreover, the green colour reflects the supplementary theme colour mint. In the beginning, there were four random scenes chosen, and people cannot alter the scenes through the prototype, but after the redesign, these issues have been solved.
Devices
The prototype can be viewed on the phone or laptop through a link. Nevertheless, it works better on the phone since you can rotate the phone and see the 360 degrees of natural scenes. The prototype was made with Adobe XD with a plugin.
Scenes
Users are able to choose from 5 scenes, including Autumn forest, Spring forest, Universe, Lake and Mountains just within the VR prototype.
Shiyu Li
Meditate to do better in exams
Major Project
Mindful