From Ancient Contemplative Practice to the App Store: Designing a Digital Container for Mindfulness
This addresses the gap between digital mindfulness tools and traditional practices for users and developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing app analysis and expert feedback.
The study reviewed 370 mindfulness apps and interviewed 15 teachers, finding that apps often reduce mindfulness to relaxation, missing its broader potential, and suggested design implications for integrating contemplative practices like compassion.
Hundreds of popular mobile apps today market their ties to mindfulness. What activities do these apps support and what benefits do they claim? How do mindfulness teachers, as domain experts, view these apps? We first conduct an exploratory review of 370 mindfulness-related apps on Google Play, finding that mindfulness is presented primarily as a tool for relaxation and stress reduction. We then interviewed 15 U.S. mindfulness teachers from the therapeutic, Buddhist, and Yogic traditions about their perspectives on these apps. Teachers expressed concern that apps that introduce mindfulness only as a tool for relaxation neglect its full potential. We draw upon the experiences of these teachers to suggest design implications for linking mindfulness with further contemplative practices like the cultivation of compassion. Our findings speak to the importance of coherence in design: that the metaphors and mechanisms of a technology align with the underlying principles it follows.