Post 2 - Critiquing an App

The Calm app is a meditation app that covers breathing meditation, with various levels of guidance and length. The app has several free options as well as a subscription-based membership that adds all the available content on the app which is regularly updated. They run sales and free trials, and that’s how I found out about it. After a year of consistent use I decided to purchase the lifetime membership as I feel there is a lot of value based on how much I use the app.

I have used the app for two years and during that time the content has expanded by adding many more topics and master classes that provide a deep dive into a topic. They’ve also added resources for music and sleeping as well as walking meditation, stretching routines and mediations for children of different ages. The app lets you save favorites so that you can easily repeat them and keeps track of total time spent using the app as well as the length of a current streak. This is important because meditation is a practice that benefits from consistency. Calm app has usability for beginners and more advanced practitioners that already have a mediation practice. For example I sit everyday, and mainly use an unguided meditation, but when I started going through a separation from my ex wife I often used guided meditations to help address certain emotions and the meditations about relationships with others to help address certain situations like creating better boundaries, closure and endings.

As far as the design, the app has become a lot easier to use over time. The landing page now has several personalized recommendations as well as quick links to meditations that you have recently used. At night the suggestions will include links to programs to help sleep. The rest of the top-level menus are for types of programs, sleep, meditate, music and a link to profile information and app settings.

While the design of the app is pretty straight-forward there is more focus on the functionality. There are many different categories of meditations and there are some areas for improvement here to improve the user experience. One improvement would be a search function, so that you can find meditations easier without having to navigate through so many menus. Often there are individual sections that you can’t see until you open a broader category such as “emotions” or “mindfulness at work”.

Another suggestion would be a more efficient way to store meditations offline. There is an option but it takes up a lot of space. To expand on this I downloaded a 30 minute commuting meditation to use offline or if I am flying and cannot connect through my data network. The commuting meditation comes in several lengths from 3 minutes to 30 minutes with 5 minute intervals (except for the 3 minute version). Within this framework the meditations are the same, there is just more time between the different sections. So the time of silence when the user is doing the mediation is longer between observing sounds and observing smells depending on which interval length you’re practicing (in the 30 minute version there’s about 5 minutes for each section, and in the 10 minute version about 1.5 minutes). But the file size is much larger for the 30 minute version. So the suggestion is to make the offline versions modular, so that the app is extending silent periods and the offline file size that’s downloaded to your phone is the same regardless of which length is selected.