BLOOM

THE FUTURE OF WELLNESS TRAVELLING

Project Overview

Challenge

People wish to sustain their wellness practice beyond home, while traveling. However, finding a wellness-centered trip that suit one's needs is a difficult and lengthy process. Most common wellness trip offerings often come in package forms, with their own set of limitations

Solution

BLOOM is a mobile application that helps people take care of their body & mind at home or while traveling through meaningful

and authentic human connection

Design Thinking Process

01

Project Goal

Create a Minimum Viable Product around the theme of

Wellness Traveling

Timeline

5 months

Tools

Miroo, Figma, Adobe Illustrator

Role

UX research, UX design, Wireframing

02

We followed a structured process for problem solving with a creative approach centered around the user. This process was characterized by:

Users needs taken into account at each step
multidisciplinary collaboration
Iteration
Bias towards action
Visual & demonstrative

03 Context

This case study about the future of travelling was part of a final group project for my masters’ in UX Psychology. My group (4 team members) was assigned the subtopic topic “theme travelling”. As a theme, we chose wellness travelling. In other words, our focus was applying a design thinking approach to the future of wellness travelling.

Why Wellness travelling?

In recent years, there has been an intensification in the pursuit of wellness. During the COVID-19 crisis, reports of mental distress have increased globally. Consumers are spending more on wellness than they ever did before (McKinsey, 2022).
The Global Wellness Institute valued the global wellness economy as a 4.9 trillion industry in 2019. With projections of reaching nearly $7.0 trillion in 2025.This can be demonstrated through the proliferation of wellness centers, Spas, yoga/meditation activities or spiritual pilgrimages.
Wellness entails various definitions, experiences and perspectives. Some studies state that it is about the reconciliation between the mind, body and spirit. Others describe it as self-development or even a spiritual journey towards self awareness and contentment.(Kelly, Smith, 2006).
As people incorporate more wellness elements in their daily life, and its increasing prevalence on social media, it is now expanding in shaping travel choices. People are organizing trips that increase physical and mental health, in order to start a new healthy routine or maintain their everyday healthy lifestyle while on vacation.
Wellness tourism generally consists of people who are self-aware, active seekers of experiences to maintain or improve their overall wellness (GWI, 2018).
Even though research shows that the integration of technology with wellness will become more and more prevalent. Technological advancements in the tourism industry is not well implemented to wellness travel yet. There is a lack of apps and websites dedicated to Wellness traveling.
With all that in mind, my group and I thought that it could be a good opportunity to explore further.

Competitive Analysis

My Team and I reviewed some platforms/apps related to wellness activity or wellness experience travelling in general to better understand their positioning in the market. Navigating through these platforms enabled us to identify what was already existing and any gaps we could fill.

04 Empathize

How can we help the wellness seeking traveler achieve their optimal traveling experience in 2022?

Our User research starts here. By answering this research question, we aim to understand :

Who is the wellness traveler
How do they define wellness
What are their motivations and expectations
What are the critical pain points of the wellness traveler
What kind of wellness trip they are looking to go on
Do they travel alone or in groups
Does Covid-19 influence planning/being on a wellness trip
What role does technology plays in organizing a wellness trip
Is Sustainability an important factor for the wellness traveller
...

After developing those key points into an interview topic guide, we sent out a screener survey first to grasp our interviewees' demographics and general wellness travelling behavior. We screened out people who were working in the travel industry to have solely the perspective of the user.

We then conducted 12 semi-structured qualitative interviews with wellness enthusiasts. Later on in the project, we also interviewed 3 wellness professionals to have the wellness provider perspective.

05 Define

Following our interviews, my team and I organized a debriefing session during which we analyzed our participants' answers. From this research data, we channeled our insights into developing three personas.

Affinity Mapping

Empathy Mapping

Empathy mapping was a useful tool to understand which user needs we could prioritize, as well as get closer to what users really think, feel, etc. Here were some of the insightful quotes we drawn from our interviewees highlighting their current sentiment about wellness and wellness trip offerings.

Customer Journey Maps

Through journey mapping, we developed a structured visualization of our personas' current experience through each interaction touchpoint with accompanying actions, motivations, and feelings. We then isolated moments in the current journey where our users experienced negative feelings. This allowed us to pinpoint what the current problems were and where there was an opportunity to intervene.

Problem Statement

From our user journey map, the most problematic moment for both the "Mindful traveler" and the "Self-care beginner" happen in the consideration phase. The researching and comparing process is lengthy and challenging.This is mainly due to their lack of knowledge of a wellness traveling platform that meets their core needs:

An authentic wellness retreat experience led by a trusted professional for the "Mindful traveler"
A wellness trip package that is flexible and diverse in terms of activities as well as budget-friendly for the "Self Care beginner"

Focusing on those issues, we decided to formulate the following How Might We:

How might we enable people experience wellness in an authentic and complete manner given the current wellness trip offerings ?

*Authentic meaning: respectful of traditional practices, led by trusted professionals, unique experience and not a

marketing scam

*Complete meaning: variety of wellness practices available

06 Ideate

After identifying the problem, the next step was about gathering ideas to feed into the design of a potential solution. We first developed a Scenario in order to help us move from an information analysis phase to a pre-project trajectory proposal phase.

After a couple of brainstorming sessions, we framed our concept around three main goals:

Offering the wellness traveler personalized wellness experience suggestions
Connecting wellness travelers with wellness professionals/wellness community
Allowing the wellness traveler to book those wellness experience suggestions

Concept Refinement

User Flow

My team and I was then able to create a breakdown of the user interface with the help of a user flow diagram that displays the happy path a user would take using the Bloom application.

Sitemap

07

Design

Low Fidelity Wireframes

We then created concept sketches, from drawings, representing the skeleton of the interface. We took some time to reflect about the basic structure of the elements so that usability was ensured before further design and development efforts were made.

High Fidelity Wireframes

[IN PROGRESSS]