Headspace 😃

The next logical step in the evolution of Headspace design

A couple of months back, I signed up for a 3-year corporate subscription (paid by my company — Delivery Hero) to

to help manage my mental health and daily stress at work. Over the next few months, I decided to take various mental health and wellbeing courses designed by the meditation team at Headspace. Unfortunately, during this time, I also found myself in many sticky scenarios where the app made it harder for me to discover relevant content by designing static app screens. I will be discussing the best bits of Headspace as a product in this write-up and the things that the team can improve to make the product more robust and ready for the future of mental health and wellbeing.Headspace’s daily welcome timeline gets broken down into five distinct parts.

The Good Part

2021 benchmarks achieved by Headspace

Headspace indeed went places in 2021. Just on Netflix alone, the Headspace series of the animated documentary was watched by over 36 million individuals worldwide. This number also pales compared to the 50 million month-on-month customers that Microsoft provides to Headspace.

Headspace provides an exhaustive range of guided meditation courses and single sessions to help individuals starting this journey become more focused and open to the advantages of dedicating 15 minutes or less daily to meditative practices. Ever since I began attending its 5–20 minute long courses or single sessions, my life has become a tad bit better and smoother sailing when it comes to managing the daily hustles of life. I can honestly attest that Headspace can help anyone starting to realize the benefits of meditation and stillness by taking small 5–15 minute long steps. Although, according to Headspace, I have dedicated around 24 hrs actively meditating thru’ the app, it’s still a bit hard for me to sit in silence for 20 minutes. But, on the other hand, 10-minute silent breath-in and breath-out sessions are more manageable than before.

The other bit that has worked for me is the wide variety of courses and single advice sessions targeted on a particular topic at hand. There are topics that I still cannot find using terms relatable to me but not to the app. But after switching to a synonym, I find relatable issues close to my original search much more straightforward. So, maybe it’s a thing of proper keyword tagging that the app’s engineers and content designers can improve over time. But overall, I have complete faith in the positive evolution of Headspace’s content library in the coming years.

The Streak

My Headspace streak data.

It’s pretty interesting to see that a product that prioritizes users’ mental health has integrated the streak mechanism to force users back into the system and convert them to daily recurring users. Streak is a fascinating concept used in more and more digital products these days, but within Headspace, it defeats the purpose because, after 52 guided meditation sessions, things become more manageable. As a user, I felt that I could meditate without opening the mobile app and, in fact, forgot about the app altogether for a few days in a row. But once I returned, I was surprised to see that reset my steak to zero 😂. Thankfully my total usage data was still not reset. In my 113 sessions’ usage so far, I have repeatedly felt that streaks induce a forced frequent use of the app and don’t prioritize the user’s mental health beyond the initial usage of 50+ sessions or sometimes even less. Touching my mobile device first thing in the morning made me lose my train of thought and forget all about the real reason why I picked it up in the first place — to open Headspace, that is.

Headspace Coaching

Probably the only missing ingredient in Headspace’s product design is integrating support for in-person coaching from different countries and monetizing the concept for the users to receive in-person coaching. In my current usage of Headspace’s product, there were various days where I felt crushed due to the exhausting workload or fighting battles on the personal front. Jumping into a guided meditation session was not enough at times like these. It required something beyond the robotic voice emitted from my mobile device, and it needed me to connect with someone in-person and share my troubles to come up with more than one practical solution. It was to the point that I could have even paid for such support, but unfortunately, I couldn’t find it via Headspace.

Things that Headspace could do to integrate coaching and improve the neural network of users’ mental wellbeing —

1. Morning journaling: Pivoting users towards setting daily goals or showing gratitude towards what they already have in their lives.
2. A Coaching network: Building a local network of like-minded coaches to help users out of a roadblock or simply a hole they might have dug themselves. I also felt that geographically located coaches might help understand the user’s condition more than those sitting in other parts of the world.
3. Rescue sessions: Design exercises and methods to immediately rescue a user from stress and the overwhelming situation. Rescue sessions can get designed around anxiety and the sense of feeling lost, anger, frustration, insecurity, low mood, loneliness, or emotional burnout. Rescue sessions were relevant in 2020–21 but will become even more relevant next year.

Static Pixels

My course likes on Headspace.

Favorites or bookmarking, in this case, was the only way I could ever find my way back to the content or meditation courses that were relevant to me. Unfortunately, like many other apps out there, Headspace relies on a static feed of data that doesn’t fine-tune its offerings according to the user’s past choices/listens or favorites. Based on the skeleton loading built across each screen, I could tell that without a steady stream of data, Headspace as an app is useless unless the users save offline media beforehand. With that said, it would have made more sense for Headspace to design its feed of meditation courses keeping three things in mind —

1. Relevance: Allow users to find and indulge in relevant courses they have interacted with or favored over time.
2. Discover: Based on the courses users have interacted with, recommend more courses they might like or find relevant currently or in the future.
3. Video-based learning: Headspace is already doing this, but I felt that it’s worth mentioning here. Currently, the app recommends a random video daily from its bank of video content. Although I prefer audio content over the video, I felt this could be a game-changer for Headspace’s active subscribers to a point where they can even break their Netflix series of content into snackable 2–3 minute videos.

I hope that you found this short write-up assuming and critiquing the logic behind Headspace’s product features relevant enough to pike your interest upwards. With 2022 around the corner, everyone in the workforce can prioritize their mental wellbeing more often.