SoundEmbrace puts immersive sound therapy experiences right in user's pockets. On demand access to sound baths that nurture and support the mind and body.
UX Designer
iOS
Branding, research, UX / UI design, prototyping, user testing
SoundEmbrace puts immersive sound therapy experiences right in user's pockets. On demand access to sound baths that nurture and support the mind and body.
UX Designer
iOS
Branding, research, UX / UI design, prototyping, user testing
Sound therapy (also called sound healing) is a practice in which sound waves are used to heal the mind and body. It may seem complicated but here’s the gist of it:
We began our relationship with SoundEmbrace by doing a Brand Sprint. We met with the company’s founder, Danielle, and we did six exercises with her to think about SoundEmbrace’s brand. The exercises were adapted from Jake Knapp's Three-Hour Brand Sprint and consisted of:
These exercises helped us to understand our client's business goals and priorities. It laid a solid foundation for the objectives and tone of the app
When it comes to at home or on the go solutions for sound therapy, the options are pretty slim. There are applications that provide calming ambient sounds, white noise, or soothing music (e.g. Sleep Orbit, Windy, and Tao Mix).
We were also able to find sound baths on both Spotify, and Youtube, but it wasn’t an ideal solution.Meditation apps, however, have been doing remarkably well. Last year the meditation app Calm was Apple’s App of the Year while apps such as Headspace, 10% Happier, Inscape, Meditation Studio, and Stop Breathe Think have all been featured in the iOS app store.
Popular features we saw in these apps include: sleep stories, calming music, and health check-ins. However, none of the applications are dedicated to sound therapy either.
Although we’d learned a lot from Danielle and our research, we wanted some first hand experience, so we attended two in person sessions.
The first was a small intimate group in a yoga studio and the second was a large group of 80+ inside of a hotel event space. This was a valuable experience that helped us to understand the method and process of a sound bath.
Our goal was not simply to design a product for people to listen to therapy tracks, but a product that truly brought sound therapy into user's homes.
In-person sound therapy sessions work as follows:
These key areas in the process informed our deign decisions.
Set an Intention
Danielle asks guests to set an intention before starting the sound bath. An intention is a short phrase to focus on during a session (i.e. I am calm, I am love, I am strong). We implemented this directly in the play a track process.
Tingsha
Each session ends with the sound of a Tibetan cymbal called a tingsha. The sound of the tingsha is high and sharp, bringing awareness back to the present and out of the meditation experience. The app would play the tingsha by default, however, users may want to turn it off for insomnia tracks.
Q&A
Our client was aware that people can have confusing or intense experiences and hates leaving participants in the dark. During the Q&A sessions we were able to learn more about how users experience sound therapy. We discovered that people see colors, experience dehydration, have digestive movements, and even tension in certain body parts. These factors helped us thoroughly understand our user and played a part in our development of a learn section in the app.
The next step in our process was to create an initial wireframe, user flow, and feature list.
When we did the brand sprint with Danielle we got to know her, her backstory, and her reasons for making this app. We learned that sound therapy and dietary changes helped heal her from major medical issues. She had experienced a lot of pain, and her goal in building the app was to let others know “you don’t have to live in pain.”
Her approach was holistic, she wanted people to take into consideration “epigenetic factors”. Her vision for the app included users taking photos of their food and tracking how each meal made them feel. When trying to figure out how to marry a hefty feature like this to the core functionality of an MVP, there didn’t seem to be a good way to go about it. If we were to track that kind of information, we’d need to figure out how to display the data users were aggregating.
Our client was receptive to feedback, and suggestions, which made our job a lot easier. We went back to our competitive analysis and pointed out that leaders in the space were focused on doing a small number of things well. We discussed the importance of focusing on the core functionality for the MVP. If the core sound bath experience wasn’t simple and pleasant for users then the rest wouldn’t matter.
We proposed creating a "Learn" section in the app. Here users could get more information about things like epigenetic factors. We also suggested creating transactional emails related to users listening trends.
During the brand sprint we also discovered that a primary user group would be yoga practitioners and massage therapists that would play the tracks while working with their own clients.To solve for this we initially were going to give users the ability to make playlists. However, we also learned that sound baths could have side effects, especially when listed to for long periods of time. Therefore we needed to prevent everyday users to sit there and listen to sound baths all day.
We discussed creating a “pro" user account type that would allow people to sign up as a pro/practitioner and be able to access the playlist feature. This would additionally, require us to create some sort of practitioner validation system. We later discovered that Danielle also wanted users who suffered from insomnia to be able to listen to sleep tracks.
The idea of an open playlist feature, and the brand’s core value of integrity and responsibility, didn’t seem like they were aligned. Giving users open access would give them the ability to potentially harm themselves.
Ultimately, we decided to scrap both the pro user and the playlists creation feature. Instead, we proposed that our client create extended tracks. This would mitigate over-exposure and prevent user errors such as playing high energy tracks during a sleep session. We would also add a warning to users before playing an extended track. Lastly, we decided to include a Favorites feature so that users could easily access their favorite sound baths without playlists.
From there we took another week to make refinements based on client and user feedback and produced the screens below.
We used the following user testing scenarios for both people that have never heard of sound therapy and people that have attended a session.
From these tests we found out:
Our client wanted a dark themed UI. This worked well since a primary use case was insomnia and we wanted the app to be comfortable for night time viewing. The client had an existing brand look from her website; however, she was not a big fan of the colors. We chose to warm up the color with pinks and purples while testing the app against accessibility standards.
We also presented the client 3 different type options and she selected Avenir Next with lighter headers.
The SoundEmbrace application is currently in development by the team at Mobile App Hero. The application should be released in the iOS app store sometime between February and March 2018.