BLOOM - an original mobile language that allows you to focus on one thing at a time.
never forget what you were last doing or supposed to do when navigating through your phone!
Bloom is an original mobile design language that promotes mindfulness for users by minimizing the transitions between apps. This language includes a game that allows users to “grow a flower” when users minimize the distractions. The system tracks that by identifying the screen time and types of apps being opened. The goal of our project is to promote healthy and informed living.
Role: UI/UX Designer (Sep 2019 - Dec 2019)
Responsible for conducting market research, creating wireframes, storyboard, and prototypes. Gained experience in producing UX flows and product specifications.
BACKGROUND
Have you ever walked into a room and forgot what you wanted to do or supposed to do? Or turn on your phone and forget what app you wanted to open so instead, opened up Facebook or Instagram? Well, I have been running into these situations everyday lol. With BLOOM implemented in your phone, you won’t run into these problems (well hopefully) and you will be rewarded by just doing what you wanted/supposed to do!
BLOOM strives to promote mindfulness to mobile users by minimizing transitions between each action.
FEATURES & DESGIN PRINCIPLE
From the findings to the left, we decided to introduce our mobile language to be:
Elegant and clean. Personal and uplifting. And like a bouquet of flowers, it inspires growth.
with four design principles -
“Minimal Informative Interactive Purposefully simple”
UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
Market research and competitor analysis were conducted on apps that promote mindfulness, such as Let’s Meditate, Readable Calendar, LifeSum, Calm, and others, to understand the scope of existing solutions within this problem space.
PAIN POINTS for current existing mindfulness apps:
Only provides mindfulness for one purpose
Users can easily get distracted when transitioning from one app to another
Inconsistent usage of designs and buttons
DESIGN PROCESS
We started the design process by creating a persona for storyboarding. We identified the potential goal that our user might have and started creating wireframes for each scenario from our storyboard. Before we start working on the actual UI, we decided the device design to be a screen of 375 x 812 pixels with slightly curved edges and all buttons on the side of the device in addition to finished the UX gestures design.
USER JOURNEY
We then created some paper prototypes based on the user story to quickly test the general usability and weed out confusing elements. This is conducted by interviewing the users and asking them the features that they wish existed in their phone apps. Then, using the feedback from the interviews, we outlined the wireframes of two apps and created several key path scenarios to further analyze the flow of interaction of the app.
APP COMPONENT WIREFRAME
After setting on the UX flows, we then created a design library that contains wireframes for navigation menu, buttons, icons, folders, etc. At this stage, the team is focusing more on consistent app layouts and evidence of componentized thinking.
FEATURES
When designing high fidelity mockup, we focused on refining the features that existing mobile languages don’t have. BLOOM’s unique features are listed below:
RESULTS & TAKEAWAYS
In terms of the design process, I learned that I shouldn’t get caught up in the aesthetic details during the ideation and prototyping phase. It is important to quickly and iteratively test the usability and flow of interaction, correct any issues, only then to move on to the aesthetics at the end.
Another really important thing that I learned from this project is to not being too tied to one idea. Our team got too excited for the gamification part as we believe that it is the feature that would allow us to stand out from others; we then got trapped into the dilemma of promoting mindfulness (minimizing distractions) and providing fun to our users. After we carefully reviewed our goal and design principle, we decided to not to implement gamification to all apps, but instead, only to health and clock apps where the victory of game can be measured by screen time or tasks completed.
If we were to continue on this project, we would go through the different use cases and conduct usability testings for app transitions to ensure that the features are comprehensive and intuitive.