AWAY APP DESIGN

A totally new mindfulness meditation experience supported by digital interactions.

Duration
Feb 2020 - Apr 2020

Role
Researcher, Designer

Tools
Adobe XD, Illustrator

AWAY is a mobile application that provides users with a totally new and intuitive experience to relax and reduce negative feelings through mindfulness meditation. It integrates the philosophy of mindfulness meditation, digital interactions and fascinating visual metaphors to immerse people into a calm and relaxing state of mind. And reduce cognitive efforts and difficulties of traditional mindfulness meditation by these digital interventions.

According to the The American Institute of Stress, there were 77% of people who regularly experience physical symptoms caused by different types of stress in 2014. And in 2019, 94% of American workers report experiencing stress at their workplace. As a potential and existing mental health issue, prompt treatment is necessary to avoid a worse condition. While sometimes people are reluctant to seek help for mental health issues especially stress and distress. Some think being stressed is a normal part of life, and they rush through life without managing and recovering, resulting in a worse impact on themselves. Those who realize their stress issues are possibly reluctant to seek help because of stigma and shame.

For previous experiments or research about mindfulness meditation, one limitation is that they relied on instructors to guide the practice physically in a group setting. And the professional instruction would also make extra cost if people want to access in daily life such as going to professional workshops, clinical instructions, etc. Furthermore, mindfulness techniques can be difficult for people without previous meditation experience (naive meditators) especially in terms of decentering.(Teasdale et al., 2002) According to the observation result of a MBSR course in the hospital, participants reported that decentering is more difficult than other techniques such as mindful breathing and body scan. Particularly, some participants explicitly reported that visualizing thoughts and feelings in mind without being drawn into them is quite difficult. (Chittaro, Vianello, 2014)Decentering is more difficult than body scan and breathing meditation because it requires a more abstract task than the others. Body scan and breathing techniques can be observed and realized by some tangible targets and physical cues. For example, people can feel the breath happen when in-breaths and out-breaths through nostrils or the physical rising and falling of the belly(Chittaro, Vianello, 2014). While in MBSR courses, decentering thoughts is completely a mental exercise that has no physical cues to be relied on. And it demands great cognitive efforts.

As we can see, without other interventions, the requirement of capacity to start effective mindfulness meditation by self, especially thoughts distancing exceeds the capacity of naive meditators. This could be a constraint that discourages naive meditators to start. Thus there is the need to explore new and supportive ways to make mindfulness meditation more accessible to people.

There were a number of works integrating EEG and other biofeedback tracking technology to measure meditative states and reflect to users. The Spire is a wireless breathing tracker, which will send an alarm if it measures a state of high tension. It supported breathing meditation by visualizing breath metrics and giving feedback.(Sliwinski, 2017) More related to this design, there were some pilot experiments involving physical interaction and visualization to support decentering in mindfulness meditation. To evaluate the new approach of mindfulness meditation practice, Chittaro and Vianello (2014) conducted a comparative experiment of AEON and traditional mindfulness practices. AEON was an experiment application that used digital interaction to support the achievement of mindfulness.

As the image above on the left, users can enter their thoughts in ink and interact with the water simulation to dissolve it. It aims to help users with the hard part of mindfulness practice: decentering. The traditional mindfulness meditation practices compared with AEON were 1)”imagine” mindfulness meditation practice by audio instructions of breathing, and decentering their thoughts as floating clouds(Wells, 2006) 2)”card” mindfulness meditation practice where people write their thoughts on a card, look at it and then toss the card (Leahy, 2006). After a 4-week study, it showed that AEON showed better results in decentering, level of difficulty and degree of pleasantness than the other two techniques. Users reflected that AEON attracted more attention, and provided effective support to decenter to reduce their negative feelings. And AEON was the most preferred technique among all.

Headspace as one of the most downloading meditation applications with the highest scoring can represent the best of meditation applications in the market. Headspace is a complex healthy lifestyle related application including meditation , workout and sleep engagement. The following would just focus on the section of stress reduction meditation function within the app that is associated with my design.

Although Headspace provides informative introductions to explain how mindfulness meditation works and how to practice different techniques of meditation, it still remains the obstacle of the visualization of abstract feelings and thoughts. And it doesn’t involve digital interactivity into the meditation process. Like most popular meditation apps in the store, the application is more like a reminder and narrator to mediate, but don’t sufficiently use the digital interface or try to remove the difficulty for naive meditators towards some core practice of mindfulness meditation. Given the difficulties beginners frequently experience in decentering, this design will be able to externalize thoughts with the advantage of a digital interface to make it easier to practice decentering.

This design aims to help with the difficulty of decentering thoughts through digital interfaces and interactions. To reduce the difficulty and mental effort, AWAY will help users to externalize their thoughts by visual metaphors and allows users to operate objectively, and ultimately to achieve a relaxing state of mind.
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As articulated by Shapiro et al. (2006), if an objective shift in perspective between the internal and external experience normally occurs, a regular mindfulness practice accelerates this shift, which can lead to a higher level of decentering.

There are three modes to fit users’ different levels of meditation experience by applying different levels of digital engagement in the practice. During each meditation sessions, users can interact with their externalized and visualized feelings to decenter their negative feelings and to relax.  "Feelings" will all finally dissolve in some ways to indicate the impermanence of negative feelings, and users can continue meditating on the basis of a relative calm and focusing mind state built by the experience.

In the second mode, users are supposed to swipe down sequentially, and the shape with feelings written on will move down and finally be covered by the bottom part. Visual metaphor in this mode refers to the sunset to build a beautiful and relaxing atmosphere.

In the third mode, no physical interaction is required, while the entered feelings will gradually be covered by the gradient shapes.

Meditations taken in Away would be documented in user’s personal journey. Users can view their meditation history and review their meditation journey easily.