A wellness app focused around Barnsdall Art Park that provides mindful exercises, a social hub for the local community, and a badge system that uplifts artwork from the park art museum.
An issue we encountered at Barnsdall Art Park was its occlusion from its neighboring counterparts. It's a very secluded area with little to no visibility outside the city with strict rules making it difficult for visitors to do any sort of activities. So who is this park catering to?
Within a half-mile radius, three major hospitals are neighboring Barnsdall Art Park, Children Hospital, Hollywood Hospital, and Kaiser Permanente Hospital, with over 13,000 workers. During the research phase, we saw many hospital workers converging to Barnsdall Art Park while on break or getting off their shifts. Desktop research showcased that there has been significant reports on healthcare workers going through burnout, mental health problems due to their jobs, and the stresses of managing their jobs and outside responsibilities.
Develop a wellness app that utilizes geo-fencing to get our users into Barnsdall Art Park, a natural environment separated from city life. That includes aspects of a social app, nodes nodes-based activity tracker to build a data portrait of the user's progress, and a badge system that rewards users with artwork from the art museum.
The interviews revealed a key insight: visitors to Barnsdall Art Park feel a lack of community connection, with many unaware of the museum or deterred by its limited hours. This disconnect highlights the need for more accessible and engaging experiences to foster a stronger sense of belonging among park visitors.
“But it’s the closest park to me, so that’s why I come here. I’ve lived here for years but never been inside the art galleries or anything.”
“I’ve been living in Los Feliz over 40 years and I never knew this place was here. I wanted to make time to sit and read in a peaceful space, away from distractions at home.
“Headspace” Headspace is one of the leading wellness apps focused on meditation, mindfulness, and stress relief. Its clean design, ease of use, and high-quality content make it stand out in the wellness space. It stands out for its user-friendly design, high-quality guided content, and diverse programs for individuals looking to integrate mindfulness into their daily lives.
“Vitality” …is a global wellness app and platform that integrates health tracking, rewards, and gamification to motivate users to make healthier lifestyle choices. It is widely recognized for its innovative approach of combining physical activity, health education, and incentives to encourage consistent wellness habits. Vitality often partners with insurance providers, employers, and health organizations to offer its services.
The creation of Stacey's persona was driven by insights into the challenges faced by first-generation college students balancing demanding schedules, family responsibilities, and emotional strain. Her character embodies the need for accessible wellness tools to manage stress, reflecting the real struggles of users seeking balance between academic, professional, and personal obligations.
Our first step in building up the mobile app was by setting up low-fidelity pages for our app. In our first iteration, we were still trying to figure out the flow of the entire app between our homepage, wellness activities, and our Mindbranch
Based on user feedback for the app, we looked back at our information architecture and narrowed down how we wanted to organize the content and see what other features we could include that make our app unique and different from every other wellness app. We refined our mind branch page and then included a badge system for gamification into our wellness app.
Through the onboarding process, we take our first-time users through an experience that introduces them to all of the different features that app has, and through the check-in process
Our homepage is open to all of our activities and all share similar visual language to insure ease of navigation through all activities
Our mind branch is our data self-portrait formed off of nodes; for every activity done on the app, it automatically gets uploaded to your personal mind branch to showcase your progress and growth through your journey on the app. The Barnsdall mind branch sits on the same pages as the personal mind branch but must click on a tab to get there. Here you can see what other users are doing at Barnsdall, and users can also upload their activities to show Barnsdall what they have been up to.
For our badge system this is where we introduce our gamification side of the app, the user will receive badges everytime a milestone is achieved, The badges that are earned are pieces of artwork from the Barnsdall Art Park and users also have the opportunity to learn more about the artist and the piece of artwork.
Our profile page functions as a tracker page for our users; this is where they can see their activity throughout the week, look at what milestones they have achieved, what are their next milestones and also be able to set their personal goals.
Personal Growth
Reminiscing on this project, this was really a huge step forward in my design career and as a leader. I have never been in a leadership position nor have I ever been responsible for coordinating other designers to get deliverables done. However I would say these past 3 months of groupworks has pushed me into my uncomfort stage and has forced me to really grow into a different designer than I was before.
