Rapitation

Rapitation is an experience and a concept created by Ariana Alexander-Sefre the founder of Sweat & Sound.

Sweat & Sound is a London based startup that creates immersive, live music driven fitness events in secret locations around London and NYC. The brand philosophy is based on the profound effect of live music combined with fitness/well-being. Sweat & Sound plans to launch a content platform, based on their Rapitation concept, to be a parallel service to their existing event booking system.

As a product designer, my role was to develop the UX/UI of the Rapitation app: a rap and spoken word Meditation platform that aims to bring together mindfulness and urban music, being an alternative to the usual mindful practice.

As part of the initial steps of this project, I had a talk with the project’s stakeholder in order to better understand the company’s goals and how the project would fit into it. Following this first interview, an initial market research was done with the intention to familiarize myself with the Meditation and Mindfulness universe and also learn about what options are already out there on the market.

This analysis made possible to discover that the most popular Meditation Apps have more similarities than particularities among themselves. Furthermore, they mostly target the same user audience.

The 3 main takeaways about the existing meditation platforms were:
- they are mostly paid subscription apps;
- offer a similar style of content that is presented as Meditation Sessions;
- lack the possibility of personalising the experience.

In order to not only better understand the Mindfulness universe, but also get to know how and why people practice Meditation, I carried out 2 online surveys with the intention to filter potential user's to further interview.

The surveys were targeting 2 different audience groups:
- one was focused on the members of the Sweat & Sound Community(that means existing customers of the Sweat & Sound service who attend the events and already know the brand);
- the other was focused on current Meditation practitioners who use Meditation Apps as a tool to help them meditate;
‍
With the information gathered from both surveys, it was possible to identify that the majority of the users consist of a female public who are between 21-30 years old.

Following the desktop research, structured user interviews were then performed with 5 different users (3 women/ 2 men) who practice Meditation on a weekly basis with the the purpose to investigate what features the existing Mindfulness Apps were lacking and why they weren’t reaching a younger demography. In order to find out what opportunities there were of attracting the interest of a younger audience around the theme, a Focus Group interview was carried out with a group of 8 teenagers (6 boys / 2 girls between 15-17 years old).

As a result of the User Interviews Phase, I was able to define the project’s target user, after identifying that there is a gap on the market that doesn’t attend a younger generation who is willing to work on their Mental Health.

By completing the Qualitative Research Phase of the project, I was able to notice that there is a pattern about getting started with Meditation. Getting started with it and actually making it into a habit takes time and motivation. The key insight from the user's interview was that users tend to lose interest quickly, specially when they face barriers that keep them from completing the desired task, such as an expensive subscription price or a limited amount of content available for free.
Turning meditation into a habit takes motivation, however users tend to lose interest quickly, therefore constantly providing a variety of content keeps the user interested for a longer period of time.

With a better understanding of Matthew's mindset and daily routine and basing myself on the thoughts and opinions I collected from the interviewed users, I was able to specify guidelines to follow for the design of the App so that it would better suit the target user’s needs. These guidelines helped me frame the Project Goal by answering the question: “how can the Rapitation app attend Matthew's needs?”.