The Canopy app offers a unique mindfulness experience through QR codes placed on trees around the WashU campus. These QR codes lead to short, engaging mindfulness activities, contributing to a community digital tree that grows with each participant's interaction.
Annemarie Spitz and Liz Kramer
Oct—Dec 2024
10 weeks
Madison Wang
Wenting Yu
Lou Nordhus
Victor Baek
Figma
Photoshop
User Research
Interviews
Usability Testing
Product Design
Visual Design
We are partnering with the hosts of WashU Mindfulness Week 2024. This is an local event series that seeks to foster experiences of “community and conversation, insight, rest and reflection.”
How could the Mindfulness Group better support students, faculty, staff, and other St. Louis community members to learn about and experience mindfulness and to take insights into their study, work, or lives?
Before conducting any primary research, we made sure to consolidate a foundational level of information regarding mindfulness on college campuses. This included: General Mindfulness Research, Broader Community Integration, University/College Specific (WashU), and WashU Mindfulness Week.
Student discount and "Back to School Essentials" tailored to college stress, with an AI chatbot (Ebb) supporting self-reflection.
Focused on individual meditation, lacking community engagement for students.
Adding group meditations or campus-wide mindfulness challenges to foster social connections and collective mindfulness.
Free student plan with ability to connect to university communities for screen-time accountability and peer support.
Primarily focused on screen-time, lacking broader mindfulness practices.
Expanding group mindfulness activities or campus events to strengthen student connections and engagement.
We conducted six interviews:
3 mindfulness week attendees
3 non-attendees
Our questions targeted their personal experiences with mindfulness.
Our interviewees ranged from professors to students to general St. Louis community members. We narrowed 5 categories down to what we thought were the three most significant insights.
“Mindfulness to me is very personal, I like to rewind my own way instead of having to go to an event.”
“Accessibility matters a lot because even if I wanted to go to an event, if it’s too inconvenient, I wouldn’t think it was worth it.”
"There are a lot of misconceptions about mindfulness, it's about refocusing your attention, not clearing your mind.”
We want busy WashU students to engage in small but meaningful mindfulness activities.
make mindfulness practices accessible in small, manageable chunks throughout the day?
reshape perceptions to highlight that refocusing attention is an effective part of the process?
create approachable opportunities for students to connect over shared mindfulness experiences?
Before we started designing, we settled on our app's main features: the digital tree, QR scanning, and prompt pop-up.
Overall, we wanted our UI to represent an whimsical, warm, and immersive experience.
The QR codes are an essential part
of our product as they are the main way users would discover and interact with our app. They are the only way a prompt can be accessed.
Not only do they have to be eye-catching, but they also have to somehow motivate the user to actually scan the code. At the same time, we didn't want the signs to stand out too much against the environment.
We participated in multiple feedback sessions with potential users, or clients, and guest designers.
Allow intrinsic reward to motivate users to complete the prompt rather than requiring proof.
Vidya (she/her)
guest design critic
You don’t want graphics or other UI elements to get in the way of the core experience: being mindful within the beauty of nature.
Jordan (he/him)
Mindfulness Science
and Practice Group
Incorporate opportunities for multi-sensory engagement within the prompts. Ask users to feel the bark of the tree, or smell the leaves, etc.
Lilli (she/her)
Mindfulness Science
and Practice Group
From the birth of a sapling to a full-grown community, the home screen constantly updates with your community's tree progress. With a clean UI, all features are accessible from this main screen. Users can zoom in and out using their fingers or through the plus (+) and minus (–) buttons on the side navigation, contributing to that immersive feel.
Users can toggle between a community and individual view, highlighting all or a few leaves at a time. We felt the need to provide users with both a personal experience for those that wanted to grow in a mindfulness with themselves as well as a community relationship for those who found more value in mindfulness when they felt like they were practicing in a group.
After scanning a QR code, a prompt pops up for the user to complete. There are three variations of prompts: Activity, Affirmation, or Reflection. There is no official verification to know if the user actually completed the prompt, but that is specifically to alleviate any pressure and show trust we have for the user. After completing the prompt, a confirmation pops up to let the user know they gained a leaf for their community tree.
Based off feedback from a guest designer, since our goal was to help students who felt too busy to practice mindfulness do small mindful activities, we should make the activity they are doing feel more approachable by giving them the option to see it wasn’t going to actually take that long—only a couple of minutes! This is opposed to a written response which could feel more like a homework assignment.
If the user zooms in to a certain point, the details behind each leaf appear and the user can look through each one. Not only does it give some sort of context to the simple tree depiction, it personifies the visuals as actual people. It is also a way to document each mindfulness action taken, highlighting the importance of how taking a small amounts of time out of your day for mindfulness can lead to a impactful result.
Footprints appear near the tree base when a user is in the process of doing a prompt. We received a piece of feedback from a guest designer saying it might benefit us to have a visual indicator that someone had visited the tree and completed a mindfulness activity to add to the sense of community. These small details add to the immersion and interactive nature of an otherwise mostly digital product.
