Headspace Heuristic Review

Headspace: A heuristic review.

Written by Elisabeth Barrett January 2020

All images belong to Headspace unless otherwise labelled.

Frank Bach, designer for Headspace wrote in this recent article, "Before you start, do some research. Without context, you won’t be able to do your best work. Even seemingly boring projects can be exciting if you re-frame them. Check out what the best-in-class are doing—there’s a lot you can learn from their successes and slip-ups."

Mindfulness applications are for the most part, intended to help people deal with stress, to increase awareness, and to promote well-being. These applications rely on the theory that regular practice of guided meditation and mindfulness can help to improve various essential aspects of people’s daily lives, such as sleep, stress, relationships

and even physical health.

Upon conducting an anonymous survey of 120 people, in which 62 were asked why they use well-being applications, more answered "To reduce anxiety." than any other option.

Illustration by Elisabeth Barrett, 2019 for "Mind!", a game prototype based on mindfulness meditation using novel interactions.

why do you use mindfulness applications.

With this in mind, it suddenly becomes even more essential that user frustrations be kept to a minimum, and that well thought-through design decisions be made. This review uses Neilsons 10 Usability Heuristics to examine what we can learn from Headspace, with a hope to iterate on their success and their shortcomings.

Survey conducted by Elisabeth Barrett and Alex Newson 2020

1. Visibility of System Status

Users are kept informed about which of the main sections of the application they are currently on, using a bottom navigation bar of tabs, with text and icons that are lit to show users location. This approach is familiar, following material and IOS guidelines, and easy to navigate for new users.

Further navigation bars are kept large and of a higher contrast to ensure users are aware of where they are, users are likely to visually prioritise the information.

When listening to audio, the user is presented with limited information, to encourage focus during meditation. The only options available are to pause audio or to exit the audio player back to the previous screen. The exit is clear, however, this navigation-less approach only works because of the lack of other options.

Minimal options are included in navigations and on screens made for focus, an eye on cognitive load is especially important here.

Documentation

The most immediate issue is the lack of options for users that are hard of hearing. Subtitles for meditations are one simple solution that although not as ideal as meditation with eyes closed, are essential for being inclusive of a large number of potential users who could benefit from mindfulness practice.

It is notable that Headspace does not have an easily accessible help button for the user, that follows any particular guideline or convention on every page, or even most pages. The Help Center is a link that opens in the device's browser and is found through the settings. Ideally, this should be more accessible. There is also a button with a reasonably unclear icon on this page, which leads to another search option, which seems to hold the same FAQ search function with a slightly different interface.

As current android guidelines state, in order to be consistent, the bottom navigation bar should remain at the bottom of every screen, which it does not in the case of Headspace. The navigation disappears to allow more space for content on screens that require a lot of scrolling, this could be made clearer, perhaps with a floating action button pointing down which disappears on-scroll.