How to scratch your own itch and build an app using Glide

What is it:

Mind Health helps you improve your mental wellbeing by practicing mindfulness, and challenging negative thinking by identifying distortions.

Maker Insight:

In the beginning, since I was primarily building it for myself, I used language that I was aware of, but most others didn't.

This was made apparent in the feedback that I got from people who were asking me questions on those points.

I was then made to empathize more with the user and simplify the language and explain terms and concepts better. All this helped make a better and clearer product.

What did I learn:

1. Two very clever design things Kavir did with Glide to create a cleaner experience, moving around Glide's limitations.

One, Kavir used the cover image that describes what the app is. When you visit the page, the top image is a logo and there is copy next to it that tells you exactly what this app is, "Improve your mental health by practicing mindfulness and identifying cognitive distortions in your thinking." Glide does not currently allow text overlay onto images. So the shortcoming Glide has is often many apps feel too text heavy. And the spaces where you have images, don't natively allow text overlay and occupy too much space on the page. Kavir overcomes this by creating an image perfectly designed for the small screen space so that he can manufacturer taking advantage of that space and making for a great user experience because the user can easily find what to focus on.

Second, Kavir performed some user testing by asking for feedback. He then listened to this feedback and solved it brilliantly with a quick workaround that doesn't take up too much space on the page. Just under the hero image and copy, he asks the question, "What are cognitive distortions?" It is only one row of space. Next to the text is a highlighted button "more". This acts like a drawer that opens when clicked to allow the user to see the answer and provide much needed clarity on a new term that many might not be familiar with. Really nicely designed here.

2. Subscribe for updates button at the bottom of the homepage. Kavir does a great job of capturing value at the bottom of the page. Positioned after giving value it is seen as helpful to receive more updates. This is a great CTA and button integrated moves to a second page that asks for the user's email. There is a really low friction way to ask for an email and to continue to provide value.

On the other pages, Kavir really adds even more value for meditation and also education. However I don't see any more CTA for subscribing. This is hard and a limitation with Glide, because putting a CTA button on those other pages would be disruptive the the presentation. Having using Glide myself there is no easy way to do this. Glide does offer some options with button design that you could play around with.

There is also a second option by having a some highlighted text to go to another page that also asks for the user's email.

The reason why I am harping on this is I believe that Kavir is doing a fantastic job of giving value. I'd like to see more attempts at capturing value in return.

3. Meditations page
Something I liked that really added to the UX and feel of the page is the gif's located for each row on this page. Without even doing a meditation I already was feeling the vibe of calming my brain. It was hypnotic. Brilliant use of simple design yet using elements to aide in the effect of the app. Because in order for a user to feel value, you want them to engage and activate a meditation. This is a key part in the user journey.

Kavir does a great job of reducing text, providing education where needed, but getting the user to activate on the meditations page as well as on the app homepage is critical. Glide helps with this by allowing for the bottom nav to be sorted by category. So Kavir can really focus on not overloading the user on the app homepage and the meditations page.