Creative Project Final

YouMeddy – DMCULT Creative Project

For my creative project I utilized Canva in order to make a presentation of the user interface and user experience of an imaginary meditation app called YouMeddy. The slides take the viewer through the process of their ‘meditation journey’ in order to highlight the ways that meditation applications utilizes gamification techniques to bring users back to their app. In order to create a realistic experience, I used placating color combinations (sky blue, black, and white) three meditation recordings, and a spatial organization that feels similar to the application Headspace. In order to incorporate meditation recordings, I recorded three meditation of different lengths (five, seven and a half, and ten minutes long) with a Zoom mic, edited the audio with Audacity, and uploaded the clips to Soundcloud. There are links to these meditation recordings when appropriate. I included gamification techniques by giving users three different levels that the user could maneuver through after each meditation, a ‘freemium’ model for meditation content, a leaderboard to compare meditation stats with friends (both an individual scoreboard to see one’s stats and a way to connect with others/compete with friends), and a way to receive medals for one’s consecutive days meditated streak. All of these techniques are game-like user experiences in a non-game space, and meditation application developers tend to utilize all of them in order to bring users to their platform repeatedly. In general, this example fits well into our class’ broader discussion on the various affordances of digital media; procedurally, the meditation application can field a variety of inputs, YouMeddy is participatory as it gives users the option to connect with peers who meditate, it is encyclopedic with the capacity to store large amounts of data about meditation statistics, and it spatially takes users on a step-by-step visual and auditory meditation journey.