Positive Affirmations Game,
Total Brain, a Sonder Mind Company
Revolutionizing mental health engagement
Total Brain is a platform that enables users to understand, measure and track their mental health overtime. The platform is composed of an assessment, games, and meditations for them to keep growing and move towards their goals.
Strategic Impact
750,000 Total Brain users
18% user rise in daily affirmation practice
11% higher user engagement
5% rise in user retention
Contributions
As Lead Designer, I spearheaded the redesign process to transform user experience:
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Conducted comprehensive user research and testing
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Developed detailed user personas and journey maps
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Created wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs
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Collaborated with product managers and engineers to implement the solution
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Ensured cross-platform compatibility (mobile, tablet, web)
The Challenge
Total Brain's Positive Affirmations Game, despite its potential, suffered from low completion rates and engagement. Our data indicated that users found the original design overly simplistic and disconnected from their daily lives, failing to provide a sense of progress or genuine reaffirmation.
The Solution
I redesigned the Positive Affirmations Game to create a more engaging and personalized experience. The new design featured an adaptive personalization engine, micro-progress visualization, and real-world integration. This user-centric approach, coupled with cross-platform optimization and an ethical design framework, significantly boosted user engagement and retention while setting a new standard for mental health apps.
Design Strategy Development
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Based on our research, I developed the "PEER" strategy:
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Personalization: Tailor affirmations to individual user needs
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Engagement: Gamify the experience to encourage daily use
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Evolution: Show users their progress over time
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Real-world integration: Connect affirmations to daily activities
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Rationale: To address core user needs while differentiating our product. Method: Synthesized user research, competitive analysis, and team brainstorming
Phased Roll-out Plan
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Month 1-2: MVP with basic personalization
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Month 3-4: Introduce gamification elements
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Month 5-6: Launch AI driven personalization and progress tracking
Key Decision
Chose a phased rollout to manage risk and gather user feedback at each stage
Rationale: To manage risk and allow for iterative improvements
Method: Collaborated with engineering to assess feasibility and timelines
Process Overview
Sketching
Key Decision: Create categories for types of affirmations
Rationale: To facilitate easy interaction and categorization.
Method: Drew inspiration from popular card-based apps, adapting for our needs.
Key Decision: Sketch multiple progress visualization metaphors.
Rationale: To make abstract progress tangible and motivating.
Method: Brainstormed with team, considering cultural implications and user feedback.
Key Decision: Ideate on gamification elements.
Rationale: To encourage consistent engagement.
Method: Researched successful gamification in health apps, adapting to our context.
User- Centric Research
Testing
I began with a deep dive into user needs and market opportunities. This phase involved:
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Conducting in-depth interviews and behavioral analysis with over 20 active users, identifying key pain points and unmet needs in the existing affirmation experience.
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Employing the jobs-to-be-done framework to uncover core user motivations
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Performing competitive analysis across 5 mental health apps, identifying a gap in personalized, progress-tracking affirmation tools.
User Testing Question Samples (Unmoderated, usertesting.com)
Key insights uncovered:
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Users desired tangible progress, not just positive thinking
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78% felt disconnected from generic affirmations
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65% wanted a way to track their mental health journey
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Pain points in current experience
User Journey
I restructured the user journey based on research insights to address pain points discovered in research:
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Difficulty remembering to practice affirmations (pain point addressed by implementing smart notifications)
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Lack of personalization (solved through our adaptive AI system)
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No sense of progress (addressed with our micro-progress visualization feature)
Low-fidelity Wireframing
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Key Decision: Simplify user flow from 5 steps to 3 steps.
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Rationale: To reduce cognitive load and improve completion rates. Method: Mapped out user journey, identifying and eliminating non-essential steps.
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Key Decision: Incorporate "Affirmation Garden" metaphor for progress tracking.
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Rationale: To provide an intuitive, visually appealing way to visualize growth.
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Method: Iteratively sketched concepts, gathering quick feedback from team and users.
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High Fidelity
Once we decided on a direction based on the low-fidelity mockups, I closely aligned design components with our design system while also considering the differences for those components across web, tablet, mobile, and native (iOS / Android). The final designs reflected past research, current research, our design system, and the goals of our personas. I designed for both phase I and phase II. , I decided on a mobile-first approach because 1) it was the most challenging for this feature (and I knew once I designed this the other devices would be easier to design for, and 2) because I knew most of Total Brain's users are mobile users.
Phase I
This phase included just a clean-up of the UI, addition of the instructions, and re-designing the existing functionality to be more easily usable (edit and save).
High Fidelity Prototyping
Key Decision: Implement haptic feedback for completed affirmations.
Rationale: To reinforce sense of achievement and encourage continued use.
Method: Prototyped different feedback patterns, testing for user preference.
Key Decision: Design customizable color themes.
Rationale: To enhance personalization and emotional resonance.
Method: Collaborated with brand team to create a flexible, on-brand palette.
Example of Responsiveness notation for feature background
Handoff
I notated the flows which explained behaviors. I walked our engineering team through the specs as well to make sure everything was clear in the prototype.
We talked about:
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error message handling
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functionalities (if the user pauses, decides to go back, exit)
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the differences between the variants of flows for different populations the assessment would cater to
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Accessibility
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differences between Android and iOS
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responsiveness for different screen sizes (shown above)
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Differences between functionality on web / mobile / tablet
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Field usability
// LAUNCH + CONTINUOUS ITERATION
We launched the changes to the exercise in phases (1, 2) across mobile, tablet, and web. All changes were initialized and maintained successfully, and we were all hands on deck for any needs / iterations. Iterations were continuous as we received feedback from our users, and we took suggestions into account no matter how far out from launch we were. We were on a mission to build the best product we could for our users, and that is a never ending process!
Impact
Since we were releasing the project in phases, it was hard to nail down the exact % increase over time. However, post-release, engagement was up 8% after phase I, and est. 18% after phase II (with 19% higher retention, all measured on Amplitude). Within the game, we addressed the concerns we found in research for encouragement. While users shared they would also be motivated by rewards and positive results, addressing the rewards component would have been a platform-wide upgrade, and positive results would be something the user would (hopefully) experience on their own over time with other features on the app (mood tracker, stress management, etc).
Reflections
While the design got a huge upgrade when considering accessibility, usability, education, and user feedback during testing - we didn't truly get to address the real barriers to higher engagement.
Using Total Brain is often incentivized by a user's employer, and it wasn't within the project scope to address other factors that could have truly been more impactful like: reminders, more hand-holding throughout the instructions for the game(s), as well as education for more context (i.e. the answers to "why should I do this?").
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