Calm Resets

Date: 2022

Role, duration: Design Lead, 2 weeks

Hypothesis: If we engage users with valuable reminders to reflect, and not just a daily reminder to open the app and meditate, then they will be more inspired to open the app, they will keep Calm top of mind, and we as a business will create a perception of Calm as a companion and ally, rather than just a meditation tool

Context:

• Users aren’t inspired to return to Calm after trying it out

• Current notifications are exclusively reminders to open the app and meditate. They do not engage users to consume our meditation content.

• Daily affirmation quote apps in the market had high engagement and download rates

Project type: Feature experiment, accessibility, systems design

Outcome: Increase in 30-day active rate due to deepened engagement with the app

Approach

There were two goals for this project: To make it a quick design exercise, and to ensure the solution was scaleable to not require support from the brand team (because of the large amount of quotes). For me, that translated to taking a systematic approach to the design solution.

To start, I audited the myriad of quotes that existed across Calm and the different content types. Given the landscape, it was apparent just how custom the majority of our quotes were. However, with the visual direction of the Daily Jay quotes, that was one exception because they were less custom and more templated.

From here, it was a quick design exercise using color and typography. Calm is known for its use of gradients, so this felt like the obvious choice for a background—it just needed to have enough contrast for improved accessibility. My decision to use three different gradients that spoke to the different times of day were an intentional choice since we would be sending up to three different quotes to a user in a given day, at those three times of day. As for typography, I simply used Calm’s brand font in a Demi Bold weight for better visual hierarchy.

Lastly, ensuring that these were scaleable and systematic meant designing them to support dynamic type. To do this, I worked closely with my Engineering team to ensure adequate padding surrounding the quote area. This way, if a user enabled larger text sizes in their settings, the quote artifact would adapt accordingly for better accessibility.

Functionally, there were three requirements: To give users a way to learn more about Resets, to give users the option to turn them off as a notification type, and to give users a way to share quotes for new user acquisition via app downloads. Since these patterns existed elsewhere in the app, I reused them to simplify scope given the quick timeline.