A digital solution to deliver a foundational understanding of mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy, and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy techniques.
Our project is a client brief brought to the school of Digital Arts and Engineering by Lorraine Millard, who is a member of staff in the University’s Wellbeing team. Lorraine runs weekly mindfulness sessions that students attend, in order to practice some of the principles of MBCT(Mindfulness based cognitive therapy) and MBSRT (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Therapy).
These therapies were originally created by Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale and popularized Jon Kabat-Zinn. In the client brief given to us by Lorraine, she requested that her five weeks Mindfulness course entitled “Droplets” could be converted into a digital representation so that the benefits of Mindfulness meditation practices could benefit as many students and staff as possible.
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Understanding the problem.
Before development could begin, we needed to ensure we fully understood the problems we would be solving. This meant exploring what the clients' current pain points were, as well as understanding what common pain points could occur, based on the experiences of others. We had meetings with Lorraine, to explore what she wanted from a digital version of her “Droplets” course. Lorraine requested that her course content on mindfulness could be made accessible for students and staff at the University of Kent, when or if they could not attend her class physically. Ellie and I then went on to inform Lorraine that it would be possible to make the course more accessible to a wider range of users through following web accessibility guidelines. This fed into our research phase and informed our personas and user scenarios.
Conducting research.
Once the initial project goals were defined, we used these to identify main areas of research focus. Surveys were written by the students that aimed to gain some insight into audience’s views on digital applications for mental wellbeing and their usage. This survey helped the us to better understand some of the issues that stood between users and the use of applications designed to improve their mental health. We also researched currents apps available to people and attended in person mindfulness sessions where we conducted informal interviews centered around the subject of mindfulness practice with members of the University of Kent Mindfulness Society. Finally, heuristic reviews were also conducted on two of the most popular mindfulness-based applications, “Calm” and “Headspace”.
Synthesis to personas.
Research was distilled into elements that had been most relevant to the project. Personas were created to inform the production of a composite of the impressions made of the students target user bases (students and staff). With the aid of the personas, scenarios were created as an exercise to explore possible pitfalls or pain points that users were currently or may in future come across. With the aid of the personas, scenarios were created as an exercise to explore possible pitfalls or pain points that users were currently or may in future come across.
Early prototyping.
Early low-fidelity designs could now begin using Sketch and Adobe Illustrator. This allowed us to plan the mobile and desktop pages from initial designs to final designs. Sketch also generated lines of CSS code, which provided some guidance during the development process. This also enabled the creation of an initial content architecture, although we were aware that this would need to be viewed with flexibility in mind.
Blurry eye to test navigation structure.
To test the initial navigation structure designs, we carried out a “Blurry Eye Test”. This was ideal because it allowed for the collecting of user expectations based on familiarity of use with other websites. This meant that decisions could be made to ensure users had the best chance of discovering what they needed intuitively, avoiding friction. This informed where users expected help to be accessible. Ellie and I found that the users expected help to be available on all pages, outside of the navigation menu.
Final testing.
During implementation, the project could be exposed to testing to find usability issues as it was being created. Following implementation, a final usability test was carried out. As aforementioned, these tests were conducted throughout the process to assure that the students met the goals set out during the research and analysis phases. This highlighted that the project had improved markedly, with overwhelmingly positive feedback, compared to initial feedback in early testing.
Changing scope and managing expectations.
One of the project’s main aims for “Present.” was to deliver the content taught during the“Droplets” course delivered by Lorraine Millard to students in person, on the University campus, digitally. As the project developed, there emerged a discrepancy between our expectations of the content that Lorainne would deliver to them, and the time scope within which Lorraine felt she could do so. Through clear communication and mediation we came to compromise where Lorainne would be less involved in the project but, would provide her voice for our meditations. We also changed the name from "Droplets" to "Present".
This project has been developed to create a resource for students and staff across a range of different digital literacy levels, to be able to access an introductory foundation to some of the key skills necessary for developing a mindfulness based stress reduction therapy practice, as first popularized by John Kavat-Zinn. This project aims to improve upon some of the areas in which the two leading applications, (“Headspace” and “Calm”) fail to provide content accessible to those who might struggle with being partially sighted, hard of hearing or who may have other disabilities. This project has explored providing transcripts for all audio meditations and video and by including a “dark-mode” for all content used.
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