How might we motivate individuals to pay for the premium paywall for a meditation app?

Background

My Role - Product Designer, UX Researcher
Timeline - 4 weeks
Tools - Figma, Miro
Deliverables - Secondary Research, Persona, Sketching, High-fidelity Mockups, Prototyping, User Testing, Next Steps Outline
Process - Design Sprint

Problem

Anxiety and Depression Statistics shown in UK in 2022 according to Champion Health

20s and early 30s have the highest rate of depression.

As one can identify from the graph, 20s and early 30s have the highest rate of anxiety and depression. Yet, they are hesitant to pay for the premium when it comes to meditation app as they don't believe in the values.

Persona

Meet Chris, a 28-year-old Boston resident who is a PhD student at Boston University. He is well aware of the fact that he has an anxiety disorder but does not believe in the value of meditation.

Design Goals

1. Design a meditation app dedicated for Chris.
2. Determine when to introduce the premium paywall in the meditation journey.

Success Metrics

# of people buying the premium
# of people exploring other meditation sessions after listening to the first

Now, time to do some benchmark research!! 🤓🔬

**Headspace**

*Headspace* does not offer free-of-charge sessions - all functions were included in a "free trial" (available for 7-14 days then it is changed into a monthly or annual subscription).

However, excluding an option to access a free medium might not be a good idea for our app, as we're not the leading market player.

Let us look at another meditation app, Balance.

**Balance**

This app starts by asking a couple of questions to access users’ mental states, which I thought was pretty clever. The app offers “premium” classes, which leads the user to the “Buy Premium” page when he clicks on the class information page.

Now that we know who our competitors are, let's move on to our user flow.

Everyone has different expectations.

I first mapped out the user flow to see when they should be introduced to a premium paywall. It was quite perplexing to figure out how much detail I wanted to show each user, as each of them I interviewed seemed to have a different standard for what materials they would use as a paid service.

0% success rate - initial user test result

I conducted my first round of user testing with this quick sketch. I came up with a logo - a seal with a comforting face - to introduce a positive and consoling atmosphere.

I interviewed five different users, all living in San Francisco, in their late 20s or early 30s. The prompt was, "You're at work. You constantly look at social media. As time goes on, you hear from other peers that your performance isn’t as expected. You feel desperate. You’re at a deadlock. That’s when you open the app. What do you do?"

Unfortunately, all of them left the prompt when asked if they wanted to buy the premium account. They were all suspicious about what additional benefit a premium account would have for them. Each interview lasted only a very short time.

At the end of the day, I had a lot to work on.

Overall turnaround on the meditation page

The major difference between the first sketch and the high-fidelity prototype is that I decided to let users listen to the entire session before the paywall is displayed. This way we respect their meditation journey as much as possible (and this way users will be favorable to us).

Here are some of the change details I've made after conducting the first round of user testing:

Switching the meditation screen from windowed to full-screen
Not introducing the paywall until the user finishes a session
The video plays automatically when a user logs in instead of waiting for them to click
Introducing a timer for each meditation session that runs silently in the background
Introducing value propositions on the paywall page

Stating some values on the paywall

The paywall page also underwent a major overhaul. My first sketch only included the price details. With user feedback not convinced the premium account is needed, I added some value propositions to the page.

Initially, I highlighted the selected button in red to make purchasing more transparent for the users. However, I quickly changed this to green due to the theory of color psychology.

Coming up with the UI guideline

The original logo - a seal with a calming face - was replaced with a butterfly icon. The rationale behind the change was that I preferred an icon-like, neutral logo rather than a cute, childish sketch. This way, it would attract more users who are more serious about meditation.

I also chose blue as the primary color, based on the theory of color psychology. According to the theory, blue represents trust, peace, and loyalty, which perfectly matches our goal.

A user opened their wallet

With the newly updated wireframe, I ran a second round of user testing - five users, moderated, two hands-on, and three via Zoom.

Three of them exited when prompted to pay for a paywall, one pressed the X button, and explored more options, and exited out, and the last user pondered for a while on the paywall page, then pressed the premium account button, resulting in a 20% conversion rate.

She later noted, "Butterfly seemed to be different from other apps that I have used in the sense that it is more optimized for my personal needs, so I thought why not try it out for a month?"

Key Research Insights

Users will not pay for the premium account by just listening to the first few sessions.

Users need a contextual explanation of why they are getting recommended on videos they see.

More Important Takeaways

Lessons learned

The importance of providing a clear value proposition in the paywall attracts users to open up their wallets
On the other hand, making users pay for an app is quite demanding.

Next steps

To test and find the right pricing for each option using A/B testing
To increase the conversion rate of the users who are ready to pay for the premium

Final Prototype

I'd love to learn how you think about the process and chat with you! Hit me up! :)