This day has been dedicated to brainstorming ideas and finding viable solutions to the ‘how might we’ questions. This helped me realize that some of the HMWs share common solutions, so can be divided into different categories.

In particular, the ‘more motivating’, ‘more immersive’, ‘more engaging’, and the ‘more personalized’ HMWs all share some common solutions, or at least have solutions in the same area. In fact I thought that it would be a good idea to add an actual prize to make the gamification more engaging, and a great choice would be, in my opinion, an e-book about some inherent topic, because it is cheap to produce, it has no shipping costs, and probably it adds more perceived value than real value.

Since the current gamification lets the user see a badly designed tree growing for each badge they obtain, I thought to bring this whole thing on a higher level; so my initial idea was to use a bonsai instead, because it is more related with meditation and so the message would have been “take care of your virtual bonsai by taking care of yourself through practicing mindfulness”. But it wasn’t enough, so since I already had the idea to make it a virtual reality app (for a more immersive meditative experience) or at least to add the VR functionality, I thought that it would be great to let users interact with their very own bonsais in VR or AR as a form of mindfulness practice that we can call ‘Mindful Gardening’.

In addition the bonsai would be an NFT (non fungible token) stored on a blockchain and it can die (technically the app burns the token when it happens) if the user doesn’t take care of it. Obviously users would have the possibility to take care of another bonsai NFT when this happens, choosing from several different species.

The ‘more personalized’ hmw also shares a solution with the ‘more empathetic’ one; here my idea was to make the app call users by their name and ask them “how do you feel today?”, then users can decide to answer with a brief questionnaire and based on the answers the app suggests a specific type of practice and/or gives some useful tips.

The ‘more relaxing’ HMW shares a solution with the ‘less chaotic’ one, that relates to the need to re-design the UI from zero, making it simple and eliminating superfluous elements with something very clear in mind: do not over-stress someone who is looking for stress relief. It also shares a solution with the ‘more appealing’ HMW, because in both cases it is a matter of designing relevant and impactful visuals, the current ones are poor as you can see from the images.