Oasis: A Spiritual Compass
Personalized Inspirations for Wellness Optimization and Lifestyle Change.
Role: Ideation, Research, Strategy, Design
Duration: 4 months
Client: Undisclosed
Users: Young Professionals
Problem
Modern day lifestyles, societal expectations, and digital dynamics have created a vast of mental health challenges for young people. The issue of mental wellbeing has gained prominent attention over recent years, with more and more people recognizing its significance in contributing to a healthy, balanced, and fulfilling life. Despite the heightened awareness, young people still struggle to address problems like stress, anxiety, and negativity on a daily basis. Wellbeing is often perceived as something hard to achieve or pursue.
Solution
The goal is to create an app that helps people enhance their wellbeing. The app is customized to cater every user’s individual problems, developing personalized approaches based on four major principles – nutrition, physical activity, social interaction and nature. The app serves to guide and encourage users to form healthy practices, supporting them in their journey of optimizing their wellbeing with ease and convenience.
User Research
Current State of Mental Wellbeing
(1 = Lowest; 5 = Highest)
A majority of participants (76%) have given a rating lower than 4 for their current state of mental wellbeing. This indicates that there is room for improvement, and the demand for a solution to enhance mental wellbeing.
Engagement in Wellness Activities
Despite the undesirable ratings, most of the participants (73%) claimed that they engage in activities that support their mental wellbeing, including the use of wellness apps.
Secondary Research
The goal for the app is to serve as a customized guide, offering evidence-based recommendations on ways to improve users’ current state of mental wellbeing. The recommendations would vary depending on individual conditions, as each of the four elements i.e., nutrition, physical activity, social interaction and nature, contributes differently when addressing various problems.
Insights
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People cannot determine effective approaches to achieving wellness.
Despite already using a wellness app or engaging in wellness activities, young professionals still struggle to achieve a satisfactory state of mental wellbeing. This suggests that the apps they are using or the wellness routine they currently have are not effective in addressing their individual challenges.
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Inability to sustain new habits leads to failure in lifestyle change.
To change one’s lifestyle, the newly initiated actions have to be low-impact or small such that they work with one’s current schedule. People also need reminders and more facilitation in the initial stage of lifestyle change, so that they can stay motivated to sustain the new routines and overcome obstacles arisen on the way.
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People are not well aware of benefits of pursuing wellness.
Most young professionals either do not feel the need to engage in wellness activities or do not fully realize the advantages of different wellness activities. The low awareness is a barrier for them to begin their wellness journey. It is also demotivator for people to continue correcting their unhealthy lifestyles as they have more doubts on whether the time devoted is worthwhile.
