Wellness app — music therapy case study
Picture this: let’s say you suffer from insomnia and anxiety, you see a doctor and the doctor gives you a prescription of music instead of sleeping pills. What would you think? I would definitely go for it! During the hard times we faced this year, music has been many people’s isolation buddy to get energized, cheer up or relax.
With my teammate Margaux Fabien-Chandellier we share the same passion for music, so it was natural for us to think about a music-related wellness app: a music therapy app.
What is music therapy?
Music therapy is the use of music by a professional practitioner, as a therapeutic care to solve disorders. Ok, but what can be cured with music? More than what you think! The power of music on our health is incredible: reduce anxiety, improve mood disorder, soothe chronicle pains, improve the quality of life of people suffering from schizophrenia, help soothing some symptoms of autism, help sleep disorder, contribute to children development, soothe dementia symptoms, improve the body coordination of people suffering from Parkinson. We would have guessed only half of them!
01. Empathizing — understanding our market and our users
Remember that our goal is to create a wellness app and we believe in the power of music to feel better. So we created this mapping: entertainment vs medical and music vs sound (white sounds).
No need to explain much about Deezer, Spotify (& co). Calm, PetitBambou are apps meant to initiate users to meditation guided with voice and white noises. On the opposite side of the mapping, there is Music Care: the only music therapy app in the market and is used exclusively (for now) in hospitals. Music Care collaborates with professional musicians to create music that match the sequences the founder set up after 20 years of scientific research.
What about us? What should be the positioning of our app? There is quite a lot of empty areas here…
So, here is where we assume our app would be positioned: right in the middle between entertainment and medical. Our goal is to make music therapy accessible to everyone, with sessions sorted by the users’ preferred music styles, to strike the responsive chord.
To go further, we conducted a survey.
Among the 110 respondents, 85% of them listen to music almost all the time to get motivated or to relax. However, only 22,6% use wellness/meditation app. The few users are satisfied at 63%, which mean there is an untapped potential to tackle. Our assumption seems to be coherent.
02. Defining — Identifying our user’s pain points and needs
Despite my pain, I avoid taking medicines, I don’t want to ruin my liver.
We conducted five user interviews using the Job-to-be-done method. They revealed very interesting insights: first, the interviewees tend to avoid taking medicines to preserve their health. Doesn’t it sound contradictory? Drugs are supposed to heal our pains, but because of a distrust towards pharmaceutical companies due to the several scandals, people are reluctant to take them. This leads to an increase interest in “alternative medicines” (osteopathy, plant-based treatment, body energies…). Few users mentioned music as a help to soothe their anxiety and depression, even physical pains.
Listening to music helps me let go and empty my mind.
(…)music sometimes soothes my violent period pains.
With all the qualitative data collected, we created both an empathy map and an affinity diagram to sort them out to retrieve the main thematics.
Finally, we created the following persona:
We came up with the following problem statement: how might we help anxious, stressed or depressed people in their day to day life, using music therapy techniques in an app?
03. Defining — our design solution
To be able to create a mid-fid version of our app, we ideated about the features the app could have using the Crazy-8 method. Then, we prioritized them thanks to the MOSCOW technique. We finally built our mid-fi prototype with all the “must-have” features, and we included some of the “should-have” ones.
Usability testing and iteration
We conducted usability testings with our mid-fidelity prototype. Initially, in the profile creation phase, the users were asked to say what brings them here. Then they had to select the music style they love and hate (remember, the sessions are sorted by the user’s preferred music styles). Finally, they had to enter their mood of the day selecting the corresponding emoji and the time they have for a session, before discovering the sessions selection. Some testers told us that the last step was redundant: as their mood can change from one day to another, they liked the fact to enter it every time they use the app but they didn’t understand why this was also part of the parameters. So we simplified the settings process by only asking the styles of music they love and hate. Then the flow is simple:
- select today’s mood “what brings you here today?”
- enter the time you have today for a session
- the app displays the playlists according to the music tastes, mood and selected duration
Look & Feel
To make sure to create a flowing design, we mixed and matched common practices as we want the users to instantly feel comfortable using our app.
- Dark background: to ease the eyes & help users to calm themselves, especially when using the app at night time. Also dark colors such as deep purple, inspires a reassuring and comfortable atmosphere.
2. Playlist cards: mimic what the user knows, to ease the use and assimilation by overprinting the playlists titles.
3. Shapes: we used rounded shapes for buttons and cards, to reinforce the soothing aspect of the app.
Our mood board is made of vaporous, floaty and airy elements, mixing dark colors with hints of bright and light colors. The “donuts quatuor” represents the visualization of sounds. From there, we created the below style tile:
We named our app: INNER FLOW. The app responds to the following principles:
Desirability testing
We conducted a desirability testing with the following 5 screens: 3 onboarding screens + homepage + playlist page.
It feels like you’re in a parallel universe, a little bubble.
The choice of the purple color gives a smooth and chilled out tone.
The calm is created by the mood of the design.
The comments about the atmosphere were very in line with our intentions. However, we were pretty surprised by the main adjective that was selected: “young”. Uhhh we didn’t mean to target only young people as we aimed to be inclusive! This was triggered by the background photos of the onboarding screens, showcasing only young and trendy people. So we changed them in the final prototype of our MVP. Please see below:
Before the day your doctor will be able to give you a prescription of music instead of sleeping pills, Inner Flow will initiate you to the music therapy wonderland…
May the power of music ease your soul.
Fatima.
