UX Research Case Study:
MoodMix

Stress-Relief, Vol. 2. Remixing Wellness & Music for a Relaxed & Productive Work-From-Home Vibe

Project Details

Research Categories: Generative, Evaluative
Project Type: Team, MICA UX Design M.P.S. Industry Challenge
Roles & Contributions: Researcher, Project Manager
Project Timeline: 7 Weeks
Faculty Advisors: Patricia Reyna-Wright

Note: The visuals on this page come from the team's final UX research report and presentation and are meant to showcase our research and design abilities.

With companies increasingly implementing WFH strategies, employees face new obstacles in balancing work and family responsibilities. Although not without its perks, this new work environment can make prioritizing tasks and setting boundaries difficult. For many, these stressors negatively impact mental health and job performance.

Problem Statement

WFH employees need a way to help manage their stress for a better work-life balance and increased professional success.

So, how might we engage and motivate employees to develop habits that lead to a more relaxed and productive WFH environment?

This team-based project took place over seven weeks. As the project manager, I was responsible for planning and coordinating all activities to deliver a solution meeting the project's requirements and constraints. In addition, I placed a high priority on research for this project and helped lead these activities. Below, I highlight some of the key methods our team utilized.

Desk Research

We began our discovery by consulting 30 sources, including many scholarly and peer-reviewed articles. In particular, we needed a comprehensive understanding of stress, including its mental, emotional, and physical facets. We also needed to identify techniques and treatments for stress relief and management to guide our future design decisions.

Surveys

Surveys helped the team gain broad insights from real-world WFH employees, providing a mix of quantitative and qualitative data, including demographics. In addition, the survey served as a screener and recruitment tool for future research. We received responses from 29 participants representing various WFH experiences, including hybrid workers.

Interviews

We needed to get deeper qualitative insights into the WFH experience and understand the goals and challenges of these workers as they relate to stress and mental health. So we developed a discussion guide using desk research and survey findings and conducted six remote, semi-structured interviews, each with a moderator and observer to take supplementary notes. On average, these in-depth conversations lasted an hour, and the 2:1 ratio allowed for increased engagement and data capture. Immediately following each interview, the moderator and observer debriefed, providing an additional perspective on the initial takeaways.

Affinity Mapping

We synthesized the data from our interviews using FigJam. This collaborative approach provided additional perspective and higher confidence in the emerging themes. Afterward, we organized these themes into higher-level groups, which were the basis of our key insights.

Diary Studies

We conducted three diary studies to supplement our interviews, providing more contextual insights. This approach was critical as WFH is a long-term experience, requiring a longitudinal method for a more complete understanding of the problem. Participants received unique Google Forms where they recorded their thoughts and feelings before, during, and after each day for an entire work week. In addition, participants were asked to rate their stress levels and perceived levels of work-life balance at each check-in, allowing for a qualitative comparison of these attitudes. The findings from the diary studies were instrumental in shaping our design choices.

Personas

Our findings indicated that stress affects people in various ways. Coupled with the variety of WFH experiences, we needed to establish user archetypes, each with their own goals and challenges. These personas helped ground and guide our solution to the needs of users.

Current State Journey Mapping

Working from home is experienced over time, so we created current state journey maps using our findings and insights to capture and visualize the actions, feelings, and perceptions of WFH employees throughout a typical workday. This approach allowed us to identify pain points and prioritize opportunities for workers to manage stress.

Competitive Analysis

Towards the end of our generative research, we knew our approach would most likely be centered around wellness. Therefore, we needed a competitive analysis to identify opportunities with many products already in this solution space.

Task, User, & Wireflows

After completing a task analysis for each persona, we created task, user, and wireflows to organize and communicate MoodMix's information architecture. These deliverables helped kick off the design process, and continuous updates were made based on feedback from usability testing.

Usability Testing

We needed to evaluate our design assumptions to ensure a user-centered product. With a strong emphasis on research, we completed two rounds of user testing on both low and mid-fidelity prototypes. We recruited seven participants from our survey/screener, ensuring that both personas were represented. We designed our solution for mobile and wearable, so we included Apple Watch users for relevant feedback. We used the rose, bud, thorn technique to synthesize the data and prioritize prototype updates.

Card Sorting

Our solution centered around wellness, and our competitive analysis provided a general idea of how these activities could be categorized and paired with music. With this foundation, we conducted two rounds of unmoderated card sorting with 19 participants (total). The first round was open to help identify potential categories, and the second round was closed to refine. Afterward, we analyzed the results using a similarity matrix and dendrogram, helping us finalize these categories for the high-fidelity prototype.

WFH: Better for some, not-so-good for others.

Many employees surveyed (90%) enjoy working from home, with 69% reporting less stress and 80% reporting more work-life balance, indicating these variables are mutually inclusive but not one and the same. However, a substantial minority of users surveyed are not seeing improvements, with 31% experiencing more stress and 21% less work-life balance, and further underscoring this distinction. It's tempting to assume that decreased stress provides increased work-life balance, but our research suggests that although related, these variables are somewhat independent. In particular, including self-assessment ratings in the diary studies helped pinpoint this phenomenon. This surprising insight allowed for a more nuanced understanding of the WFH environment and helped shape our final solution.

Positive mood states manage stress and promote productivity.

Desk and user research emphasize the power of Positive Mood States (PoMS) in regulating and managing stress levels and underscore the profound effects these affective states have on mental, emotional, and physical health. Not only can PoMS help relieve stress, but research indicates they can act as a "buffer," helping people become more resilient to future stressors, promote creativity, and increase productivity (Linden 2005; Fagan 2017). PoMS can be triggered through various activities, including physical activity, social bonding, taking breaks, and music, and studies show that people have an innate desire to maintain this positive state (Carver and Scheier 1981). In fact, many of our research participants reported many of these activities in their stress management routines, helping to confirm their effectiveness.

Note: For further information on findings and insights, please contact me.

 Phase 1 Features

• MoodMix Community

• Music Streaming Integration

• Social Media Integration

• Onboarding Chatbot

• Stress Level Notifications

• MoodMeasure Self-Reporting

• Biometric KPI Reporting

Strategic Impact

As we considered various approaches to solving the pain points of WFH employees, it was evident that there were factors beyond our control: the lack of physical space at home, the management style of supervisors, and children's remote learning, just to name a few. A more nuanced understanding of the relationship between stress and work-life balance also helped us realize this. So, instead, we focused on where we believed we could affect the most change--stress management via PoMS. Research indicates multiple ways to achieve a positive mood state, allowing users to have flexibility in managing their stress while providing new and exciting opportunities for future features.

As a wellness-centered app, we wanted our solution to utilize biometric technologies and minimize external distractions when in use. With this in mind, we designed MoodMix as an MVP product for iOS and Apple Watch. We selected the Apple ecosystem due to a high level of synergy between mobile and wearable products and its #1 position in the smartwatch category, with 36% of the worldwide market share (Chen 2021).

Phase 2 of MoodMix will expand to other wearable formats, including Android and Samsung Galaxy Watches. We also plan on exploring new features such as live mixes with expert MixMasters and an enhanced member community for additional social connectivity and motivation. Although further research will be necessary, brands like Peloton illustrate the potential of this concept.

 Planned Phase 2 Features

• Live MoodMixes Sessions

• Enhanced Community Features

• Platform Expansions

  • Android, Samsung Watch

  • Garmin Venu Series

  • Fitbit

Business Impact

We found that a substantial minority of employees are negatively affected by the WFH experience. However, that is not to say the remaining majority of WFH employees are entirely stress-free. Quite the contrary, our survey found that 90% of workers experience some stress when working from home. Therefore, a solution targeted at the needs of this minority improves the WFH experience for everyone.

Zooming out even further, we know everyone experiences stress (National Institute of Mental Health). A benefit of the PoMS approach is that it is not limited to a WFH context. With this in mind, we believe that MoodMix has immense potential, especially considering the tremendous growth in the fitness and wellness app segment, with an expected annualized growth rate of 14.72% through 2026 (Statista 2022). A complete business plan is the next logical step to investor funding and commercialization. Part of this plan will include a profit model with ad-supported, subscription, and hybrid approaches having been discussed.

• The value of a risk management plan cannot be stressed enough. Nothing goes exactly as planned, and being prepared in advance makes navigating the changes more manageable and keeps the project on course.

• Recruiting the right participants is crucial to getting quality user feedback. As an iOS and Apple Watch product, we needed to gather data from users with experience on both platforms. The insights of Apple Watch users were tremendously beneficial as most of the product team were not users themselves.

• The diary study is a powerful research method that sacrifices quantity for quality and requires substantial effort from the researcher in the form of consistent participant check-ins. We believe this effort was worth it, especially when combined with other methods like surveys and interviews, providing a critical insight that led the team towards the stress-management approach to the challenge.