Intentions
Intention Setting
ux / ui design – 2024
“Love this intention settings feature. It helps with setting your day right and also helps you have accountability to yourself!” – User feedback
Brief
At Insight Timer, we aim to provide our users with diverse ways to enhance their wellbeing beyond traditional methods like meditation. We believe that small habits can lead to significant changes. Our team was tasked with brainstorming new and innovative, bite-sized wellbeing practices/features that empower users to intentionally cultivate healthy habits and hold themselves accountable. The theory is that if we can create easy to use features that don’t involve heavy time investments, we can improve our DAU and CURR metrics.
Initial research phase
Through observing user behavior in our groups feature, I noticed many members actively sharing their daily intentions and affirmations in the social feeds. It’s clear that our users are passionate about setting and maintaining their intentions. This presents a valuable opportunity for us to enhance the Insight Timer experience by providing a dedicated space for the community to enter, record, and integrate intention-setting into their daily practices.
Intentions research
To understand more about intention setting and best practices, I conducted topic research. This included researching the power of setting intentions and how to do it correctly, understanding and differentiating between goals vs intentions and examples of clear intentions you can set. This knowledge helped me to shape the product ideation and start put ideas into design wireframes.
Competitor research
Looking at the market, I couldn’t find a direct competitor for this particular feature so instead looked at goal setting and journalling apps (such as Atoms, Habitify, 5 Minute Journal, etc) to understand how other platforms introduce and help a user set a goal with introductions, the end to end flows and additional features such as reminders to stay accountable.
Wireframes
I designed core flows in a low-fidelity wireframe format to present the initial idea and how the feature would work within the app.
Stakeholder feedback
At this stage, I presented the idea and rational for this feature to the executive team for feedback. It was decided that this idea would be built and tested in the app and I gathered an array of feedback from experience to interface ideas. With the seal of approval I moved to designing the full flow of the feature and high fidelity UI designs. The three main areas we decided to focus on for this feature was the actual intention setter itself and making the user feel good about what they are doing, a widget for the user to have consistently showing on their phone screen, reminding them of their intention and finally getting the user back into the app to log their intention each day.
User flows
2. Log an intention
V1: High fidelity designs
In testflight, we asked our team to try the new feature and ran internal testing using a prototype. The main feedback was that they didn’t want to the voice recorder to be the primary input and found the stars icon for the suggestions confusing and thought they should be front and centre on the main intention setter screen. There was also a request to align the UI to the apps new branding. This feedback was implemented and then released to the team.
V2: High fidelity designs
With changes made from the internal testing feedback, I designed a v2 of the high fidelity designs for both the setting and logging of the intention for light and darkmode.
Soft-launch
We decided to release the feature in an initial soft launch format which allows users searching for intentions on the app to discover the feature in places like topic pages and shortcuts. This allows us to monitor the feature usage and we also decided to include a way for users to provide feedback inside the production app once released, with ‘share feedback’ option on the log intentions screen.
User feedback
Next steps
Looking at user feedback, it is clear that editing intentions, viewing previous intentions, and setting intentions for a set length of time are really important and missing functionality for users. Therefore, we will prioritise creating solutions to address these pain points for the next version of the feature.