MagicSeed

An affirmations app for focused daily practice.

As a personal project, I designed the MVP for a mobile affirmations app to build deeper daily affirmations practices.

Background

Affirmations as a practice spans a millennia, often at the center of both theistic and non-theistic practices. It is a method for cultivating purpose, contentment, connection, love, and gratitude–increasing quality of life, and even changing the course of a person’s life.

Creating affirmations practices is hard. Knowing where to start, the why behind a practice, making that practice a habit, and tracking progress all pose barriers—barriers in which an app specifically could be very impactful.

For something as powerful and popular as affirmations, the most prominent existing apps are often hard-to-use and offer very superficial practices.

Goal

With my background in psychology and product design, (and transforming my own life with affirmations), I became immersed in this project. I wanted to build an app rooted in science and psychotherapy to offer practical tools for people to appreciate the magic and beauty of life and create the changes they sought.

Scope

MVP for a daily affirmations practice.
Company logo and branding.

My role: Full-stack UX designer

Discover Define Design Test

Discover

My research goals were to identify key pain points and opportunities for facilitating deeper and more focused daily affirmations practices and to scope an MVP for an app.

I chose these methods to balance efficiency with useful insights.

Competitive research

Analyzing existing apps to assess usability, features, and aesthetics. Combing through user reviews to find strengths and weaknesses of each app. Data from user review aggregator to assess user base and revenue.

SME interview

Interviewing a practicing, credentialed psychotherapist.

Literature

Reading relevant literature recommended by SME for adjacent subjects to affirmations–neuroscience, psychology papers, and hypnosis.

Discovery interviews

I conducted 4 in-person interviews about their treatment of mental health, self-care routines, previous experiences with meditation apps, views and experiences with affirmations, and their personal areas for growth.

Contextual inquiry

I observed users as they navigated the benchmarked affirmation app, Mantra. Contextual inquiry is a great way to assess product strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities before any investment in building a prototype.

Benchmarked apps for competitive review.

From the discovery interviews, SME interview, and competitive analysis a number of patterns emerged.

Research insights

Support users with building habits.

“I forget what to do…I lose that motivation I have initially.”

Create embodied practices.

“My body is something that’s really valuable to me…I clearly have an affinity towards bodily activities.”

Maintain mindfulness habits once users feel better.

“My mediation habit fell off with the return to normalcy and feeling better in myself. For the first time I’m trying to maintain these habits when I’m feeling good.”

Personalize the app to resonate, both through tailored affirmations content and the design.

“I feel like sometimes it’s just a way to wash away the things you don’t like about yourself…I try to say ‘I am getting better’ or ‘I’m working on this.’”

Blend science-based insights and spirituality—these approaches to mental health are complementary.

“Who’s to say that spirit and medicine aren’t connected.”

Documentation: Interview Script | Empathy Research | Research Debrief

Personas

I synthesized my discovery interview findings and created personas. Because of differences in user propensity for habit-building and their receptivity towards change and affirmations, 4 personas capturing the spectrum of these patterns were created. 2 of these personas, based on customer value, were selected as lead personas.

Documentation: Personas

SME interview

For the design, the app should support users in creating a daily ritual, induct them into the practice with systematic relaxation (such as breath work), recruiting all of the senses for imagination, and assist users in recognizing progress.

Daily morning meditation / affirmations practice, setting 3-5 intentions for the day.

Documentation: Expert Interview Full | Expert Interview Insights

The value prop that was validated through the research was an intentional, embodied practice to manifest real change, based on science and psychotherapy.

Define

Flows

The research identified user needs and based on those, the app would need these flows:

Basic Practice ‘I want to practice letting go’
Modify Practice ‘I want to add or subtract affirmations’
Expand Practice ‘I want to find and add new collections’
Deep work ‘I want to do a structured program’
Create Custom Practice ‘I want to create a new practice’
Track Progress ‘I want to track my progress’

Happy path

The primary flow is the affirmations practice because that’s where the app delivers value. This includes navigating to the practice, selecting the induction, selecting the affirmations, and going through the practice to completion. These user flows helped me inform what screens I needed to design.

Shifting from the happy path to low fidelity wireframes, there were a number of opportunities for the affirmations practice.

Low-fidelity wireframes

Practice Description Screen

Pain point: Other apps employ swiping through an endless stream of affirmations. Often ‘silly’ sounding or less relevant affirmations come up frequently, disrupting the flow and undermining the practice.

Opportunity: Give full control over which affirmations to center in the practice and have that decision outside the boundaries of the practice itself.

Systematic relaxation screen

Pain point: Framing around affirmations is minimal–providing little state change (such as through meditation) or context for affirmations such as anchoring to time of day or an embodied practice (such placing one’s hand on her heart).

Opportunity: Provide systematic relaxation through an audio meditation induction and context for the affirmations through the collection description and audio script.

Affirmation selection screen

Pain point: The endless stream of affirmations in other apps makes each affirmation feel less intentional.

Opportunity: Encourage narrowing the number of affirmations to the magic number (3-5).

Affirmations practice screen

Pain point: No set beginning or end to the practice experience–adding a right-brain decision point in the practice itself about when to end (diminishes hypnosis). Additionally, the swiping potentially disrupts a hypnagogic state by requiring user action.

Opportunity: Create a practice that has a predefined beginning and ending. Add an autoplay feature so that the affirmations automatically move to the next one.

With the information architecture and task flow in place, I moved into creating the visual identity to create high fidelity prototypes.

Design

Visual identity

Existing solutions either didn’t feel credible or felt hyper-feminized. Based on the competitive analysis, SME interview, and discovery interviews, the brand positioning emerged as:

A credible, dreamy, sacred space to hold changes that people want to make within themselves and their lives.

For the app name, although there was a large field of contenders, ultimately, the final selection was MagicSeed because it felt memorable, distinct, and grounded.

Inspiration

For a more youthful audience between the ages of 18-35 and primarily women, the following were taken as creative influences:

Color

Most meditation apps aimed at calming anxiety or stress use dark-mode. A dark, dreamy palette was inspired by the connection to hypnosis and the unconscious (also recommended by the expert).

Imagery

The Greeks understood the power of the unconscious–constructing elaborate dream temples. Flora as a symbol emphasizes both the wildness and surprise of growth, as well as the ability to cultivate it. Taken together, the classic beauty of Greek art and architecture and the wildness of flora symbolize growth as the blend between artifice and a natural process.

Grid

Centering the unconscious, the grid system is overgrown by blossoms, a metaphor for the magic seed planted by affirmations which bear fruit in all areas of life. Grid-breaking is also well-aligned to design trends among the target audience (women, age 20-35), as evidenced by Co-star and Stoic.

Ample space between elements facilitates a feeling of internal space. A cluttered interface induces a counterproductive feeling of stress and choice overload. So each screen minimizes info to only what’s relevant.

High fidelity prototype version 1

Audio scripts

People’s level of embodiment versus dissociation, imaginative ability, and familiarity with mindfulness means that each person’s optimal induction varies. If someone is preparing for sleep versus waking up in the morning, there is also a difference in what the optimal relaxation technique may be.

Because of this, a choice is given for which induction to use.

The audio scripts, while differing in technique, each contain a similar structure of orienting the user in their space, sitting or lying comfortably, a couple breaths, the main technique, then orienting back to the affirmations.

To create a calming, dreamy app personality, the micro-interactions and page transitions move at a slower rate.

Test

To best leverage time with users (and because affirmations as a psychological tool is very contextual), I used high fidelity designs to get users’ initial reactions for the app’s usability and desirability.

Research outcomes

What went well:

Entering guided practice. The audio screen was clear and well-laid. The light visualization script was very well-received, with good structure, pacing, and content.
Practice. The practice of reading each affirmation was well-received.
Content structure. The 2 participants that use meditation apps were aligned: while it’s nice to have some variability, they tend to land on the 2-3 familiar meditations which work for them.
Brand impressions. Overall, the naturalistic images, including the butterflies, moths, and the flowers, were well-received. The color scheme and gradients were well-received. MagicSeed as a name was very well-received by the female participants.

What did not go well:

Entering guided practice. The induction screens, including what ‘Guided’ meant in the context of affirmations, required clarification. There was uncertainty around what each of the heart opener meditations meant.
Practice. However, controls to go to the next screen, change affirmation duration, and change themes required created some frustration for users. Users desired only what was strictly necessary for the practice, and change the practice, they simply wanted to touch that element. For example, to skip to the next affirmation, they wanted to tap the screen, like in Instagram stories. Or to change the affirmation duration, they expected to tap the timer. ‘Affirmation duration’ (i.e. duration of each affirmation or the whole affirmation practice?) was ambiguous to one user. Proposed times were over-estimated. The ending screens for the practice caught the attention of one user because the POV shifts from ‘I’ to ‘you’. Differentiating affirmation screens and the end of the practice screens more was recommended.
Brand impressions. ‘MagicSeed’ was intriguing for the male participant, but with some reservations for the ‘magic’ part.

Documentation: Usability Test Planning | Usability Results

Revised high fidelity prototype

Based on the results of the usability testing, the copy and practice controls were modified to create more clarity and align with user expectations.

The first design had the main visual elements, but had room for improvement. The typography could be improved and some components were relatively too large or could be better stylized for dark mode. Additionally, the home screen was an opportunity to reinforce the habit of opening the app for different times of day.

Next Steps

Conduct diary study with 3 participants to understand if a very polished prototype can deliver the app’s objective. This will help determine what the design is for MVP.
Refine the remaining screens, the unhappy path, and designing the onboarding process.
As we launch the MVP, here are the business objectives and KPIs I want to track:

What I learned

I learned about how to improve grid systems and typography to overall elevate the visual design. Additionally, through this process I encountered the difficulty of importing common patterns from other apps and will approach this challenge differently in the future.