The image shows a smartphone displaying a meditation app interface with a clean, minimalist design. The screen highlights a recommended meditation titled "Open and Curious Mind" with a play button and search bar at the top. Below the main section, there’s a category called "Explore Meditation" featuring new and popular sessions. The color palette includes calming shades of blue, yellow, and orange with playful, abstract illustrations. To the right, there’s a stylized graphic of a staircase in warm orange tones with a small, peaceful face resting at its base, symbolizing relaxation and progress.

Overview

Company summary

Headspace specializes in providing mental healthcare, including coaching therapy and psychiatry, as well as meditation mindfulness tools. The company mainly operates through its online platform, which provides online counseling and mental health coaching services as well as guided meditation through a paid subscription service model.
_Source:_Crunchbase_,_Wikipedia_‍

The challenge

Headspace’s drive to be an all-in-one mental health app is diluting the brand. It has evolved from a simple meditation app into one with mental health coaching, study music, video reflections from experts, workouts and more. Customers are overwhelmed by the amount of content in the app and struggle to get to the content they want.

As headsapce looks to increase partnerships with major brands like Netflix, they are also aiming to become the go-to health platform for enterprises by replacing traditional employee assistance programs (EAPs). These new initiatives are creating tension with the core meditation offering. The additional services are creating an overwhelming experience for users. The trade-offs of this expansion and strategy need to be carefully considered in order to retain customers.

‍”Headspace used to be a beautifully simple meditation app that helped me practice. Now it's so forced and overstuffed with content that it's really the opposite of what a person trying to meditate needs. It's become a hodgepodge of general wellness-oriented content, all topped with the occasional pop-up about some new feature I don't care about.” - Jefimija Bijelić

Goal

I wanted to understand what challenges users of headspace encounter that would prevent them from using the platform to create a calm mind. Removing these barriers can help more people experience peace.

Outcome

Identified a critical business risk and designed a solution: I discovered during research that Headspace's ambition to become an all-in-one mental health app was compromising the brand's core identity and focus. I designed a solution to this challenge that addresses user pain points related to this brand evolution while still allowing the business to expand.

What motivated me to do this work… 🤔

This is a self directed solo-project, I am motivated to do what I can to help more people experience the benefits of mindfulness. I started my mindfulness journey years ago and want as many people as possible to experience the clarity and freedom meditation can provide. I also want to help expand access to wellness resources and to continue raising mental health awareness, in order to counteract the rising levels of mental illness.

“Your mind is the basis of everything you experience in life. And of every contribution you can make to the lives of others**.** Given this fact, it makes sense to train it.” - Sam Harris

“The body and mind are not separate. When we have presence of mind we have presence of body, when we possess mental focus we possess physical focus, and when we have an ease of mind we have an ease of body.” - Andy Puddicombe

“The most valuable skill you could ever develop is directing your thoughts towards what you want.” - Ester and Jerry Hicks

Read on below to see my process...

Discovery

Research - understanding users

Developing a research plan 📝
‍I began by creating a comprehensive research plan to guide the project and uncover users’ needs. My focus was on identifying common challenges that Headspace's mobile app users face.

Adapting research based on resource constraints
‍A common challenge I have faced in product design is adjusting user research to fit within the project's constraints, such as time, budget, or organizational awareness. To address this, I conducted secondary research by exploring existing online data about Headspace users.

Analyzing user reviews
‍I collected negative reviews from the Google and Apple app stores to pinpoint user issues. Through thematic analysis, I grouped common complaints and identified trends. Additionally, I searched for reviews related to the company's four core values and goals. Given a larger scope and budget, I would have conducted direct interviews with users to gather first-hand data.

A visual layout showcasing categories and subcategories of customer feedback, including areas such as technical issues, support, functionality, cost, and user experience.

‍Main User Pain Points

I identified two areas of concern but chose to concentrate on the first one considering the project's scope and timeline.
Let’s focus on this first one 👇🏾

Users can’t find the content they want
Customers are overwhelmed by the amount of content in the Headspace app. Headspace has gone from a simple meditation app to one with many additional features like mental health coaching, study music, and workouts. These additional features distract from the core meditation tools and make them harder to access.
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Unclear pricing
Messaging around the cost of the app, the trail period, and how to cancel is not clear
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Evidence of the problem - user Quotes

‍‍“In general this app is great, but they have SO MUCH content, all named differently, all different categories. Man I just want to meditate... Not search 20 min for what I want, and not know what 90% of the un-relevant stuff is.. I get anxiety just opening the app. Sometimes less is more”
- Robin Criel
“Downloaded it years ago and loved the simplicity. Now its over saturated in half-baked content.”
- Ben Church
“I liked it back when it was meditations and sleepcasts (the exercise part is probably good too). I'm not interested in the videos where people talk about things - I want to meditate, and it's annoying to have to wade through things that aren't meditations…”
- Naomi Ann Bicheno

Key Insight

The drive to be an all-in-one mental health app is diluting the brand. “Experience creep” is taking hold as the product continues to grow in complexity.

Customer impact

“Headspace has gone from a beautifully simple and curated selection of accessible meditation and sleep tools to a bloated hodgepodge of features and tangentially-related projects. We don't need mental health coaching, study music, or workouts on our meditation app. It only takes away focus from the actual good part of the product and makes it harder and harder to access.” - Arraine Siefert

‍Company impact
‍While reflecting on the impact of Headspace becoming an all-in-one mental health platform I made the following observations:

Balancing new partnership opportunities with the existing brand voice
Becoming an all-in-one mental health platform, has significant trade-offs. As Headspace seeks out new revenue streams in the form of corporate partnerships with it’s additional mental health service offerings, the user experience is becoming bloated and less focused.
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User Retention
User are being lost, those who struggle to find the content they want give up and move on. Experience creep is taking place, making the app more complex as more features are added.

Bar chart depicting the progression of product complexity from MVP to late product, showing how different features (Feature 1, Feature 2, Feature 3, Feature 4) add complexity, especially in user organization. — Source: UX Pscyhology - Peter Ramsey

Ideas for improvement

‍Make meditation resources easier to access
Expected Impact: This enhancement is anticipated to help users find their desired content quickly, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and fostering loyalty.
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‍Improve the on-boarding to more effectively customize the app to users' preferences
‍Expected Impact: This update is expected to reduce the time to value, enabling users to access the most relevant parts of the app immediately upon their first login. This improvement is also likely to reduce the churn rate by keeping users engaged from the start.

Solutions

3 different views of a Phone with headspace app showinging

1. Updating navigation to facilitate quick access to mediation content

After observing the difficulties users encountered when trying to quickly access desired content, such as meditations, I revised the layout. I created a dedicated and persistent section specifically for meditation. While all other mental health services remain available, meditation now has a more prominent position in the information hierarchy.

Original layout
‍Meditation is not easily accessible. Users must click through content to get to meditations.

Updated layout
‍Meditation content is always accessible via the bottom Nav.

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Meeting user and business needs
‍This solution is the best of both worlds. The core meditation content is much easier to access for users and the business gets to continue expanding services, evolving into an all-in-one mental health, and building additional partnerships

2. Improving the on-boarding experience

Since users mentioned that Headspace is a “bloated hodgepodge of features and tangentially-related projects.” I wanted to use on-boarding to focus their experience and bring them their “Aha Moment” sooner by showing them the most relevant content quickly. I added an add an additional question to onboarding to better understand the single most important need they have.

Specifying the users intent
The previous on boarding allowed users to pick multiple outcomes that they wanted to achieve with the app.

I added another question asking them to pick the single most important outcome so that the content they see after onboarding is specific to their most important need

Results

Improved findability of mediation content

I expect that the impact of this design change would be an increase in the find ability of meditation content as measured by tree testing. With additional resources I would conduct user testing to confirm this.

Testing to ensure the intended impact is achieved

Assessing the time it takes for users to locate the most important content.
‍Users mentioned that headspace is “overstuffed with content” they were unable to find meditation content quickly. The findability of meditation content should be measured to see if the design changes improve it. This can be achieved by doing tree testing to see if users can find key resources. I would measure the following during the user tests:

Success rate: The percentage of users who found the meditation content
Directness: The percentage of users who found the meditation content immediately, without backtracking or trying any other categories
Time spent: The average amount of time elapsed from the beginning to the end of the task

Why it matters
I have addressed the user pain point related to accessing meditation content—while maintaining the expanded features business needs to evolve into an all-in-one mental health platform. There are 1.3 million existing users who started using the app before Headspace rolled out “Headspace for Work” and additional health services like coaching.
‍_(Source:_{Dev Technosys}_{) These users now have easier access to the mediation portion of the app that the brand was founded on.}

Conclusion

Profound positive changes in the mental wellness of society as a whole via increased access to mental health resources is possible. With companies like Headspace leading the way we may soon reach a point where everyone has the awareness and opportunity to improve their mental health.

“The clarity and freedom you can experience in periods of meditation are no different than the clarity and freedom you can experience in your life.” - Sam Harris

I started my mediation journey 7 years ago on a whim and recommendation that I try Headspace from a friend. Building awareness and training my mind has been the single greatest improvement to my well-being. Everyone should have the opportunity to experience this.

What I Learned

Working on a product from outside a company eliminates red tape and bureaucratic barriers. However, it also makes accessing information and knowledge for decision-making more challenging. I did not have access to, institutional knowledge, past user research, or the company’s design system (I used a close approximation created by the design community).

Discovering user needs without direct access to them.
Learning about users without direct access to them was the most challenging part of this project. I learned how to gather, format, and organize online data, in this case from the apple and google mobile stores, and prepare it for research analysis.
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Uncovering company strategy and direction from press releases
‍I read articles and press releases, and Headspace’s mission and values to approximate their current goals and direction. I learned about their drive to become an all-in-one mental health app by reading about their merger with Ginger Health.
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What I would do differently next time
Given additional resources, time, and access to information I would interview users directly to create a deeper understanding of psychology and motivations (this could also be achieved with the user data Headspace has in house). I would also work with the data science team (or applicable team) to understand how the brand is trending as measured by NPS and customer retention rate.
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Assessing the time users take to find key content
Users mentioned that headspace is “overstuffed with content” they were unable to find meditation content quickly. The findability of meditation content should be measured to see if the design changes improve it. This can be achieved by doing tree testing to see if users can find key resources. I would measure the following during the user tests:
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- Success rate: The percentage of users who found the meditation content
- Directness: The percentage of users who found the meditation content immediately, without backtracking or trying any other categories
- Time spent: The average amount of time elapsed from the beginning to the end of the task

Customer loyalty
In order to ensure that Headspace maintains it’s emotional bond with customers as it evolves into an all-in-one mental health platform I would also measure customer loyalty. This would also verify that the redesign is helping improve the customer experience. I would measure this using the customer loyalty index (aiming for 60% or higher) and churn rate (this should not increase and would ideally decrease).
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Collaborating with data science team to assess additional impacts
This work could also have a positive impact on the customer retention rate and net promoter score. However, continuous measurement and collaboration with the data management team are necessary to confirm this.

Next Steps

Quick win opportunity: pushing updates to a portion of users
Some quick wins could be achieved here by rolling out these changes to a select portion of users, tweaking if need be based on their feedback and then rolling out to more users. This process can be repeated multiple times for continual improvement to a wider and wider user base. I suggest first asking all users if they are open to participating in a test to improve the app. For those that say yes share the new layout, collect feedback, and then release the updates.
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Further customizing the app based on user preferences
In-order to continue offering additional features without overwhelming users I would allow users to select preferences based on what their goals are with the app and then filter all content so that they only information relevant to their goals. This gives users only the content they need while allowing the business to offer a wide variety of services improving its ability to win additional contracts as an EAP replacement.

See more work

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Improving the findability of meditation content for a mental health app