Introduction to the project
Our second project at Ironhack Bootcamp back in 2019 was to transfer an in-person experience into an online class while still maintaining it as valuable and desirable for the users(I just have to mention, isn’t it kinda freaky we had it two months before a pandemic? My teacher was a visionary or what…). My team(Shelly Benson and Jeremie ROBERRINI-NEVEU) chose Bluebirds Yoga as our stakeholders and tried to find out why anyone would like to switch their in-person class into and online one. We reached out to yoga teachers, the yoga studio owner, yoginis, athletes, and people less involved in sports (but interested in changing that). Essentially, we contacted anyone who could contribute to our understanding of the situation.
User Research
Surveys, Diary studies, Interviews
For interviews we chose a few people from each of the groups I have mentioned above. When it comes to surveys we wanted to identify our target group, since, as I mentioned above, we did not really know yet. We knew one thing — our target user has to have at least a slight interest in yoga. And that was our screening question.
We obviously had certain assumptions. We believed that individuals who might be interested are those with prior yoga experience and a lack of time to attend physical classes. It turned out we were wrong. Here is what we discovered.
What did we find out about our audience?
- >70% is between 21–40 yers old
- 70% females
- 55% of them are working professionals
- most importantly — 90% turned out to be newbies!
Who are newbies? People interested in the idea of yoga who have never tried it! Our first survey also helped us understand why — because they don’t have enough time! This is the most commonly checked box with as much as 50% of responses. Aha! So at least one of our assumptions was right. Let’s dive in deeper — why? Why are they so busy? What keeps them away from yoga? Are our users kind of lazy and we need to motivate them? Is there even a way for us to put yoga into their lives?
Well… As we do in UX/UI, we dived in deeper. And oh wow, how it was worth it. Again, I am not going through every single assumption that we had but oh boy, we were so wrong. It was truly a great learning curve for me. I understood the importance of asking “why” at least five times.
After the second survey we gathered enough important data — ours users are athletes! Over 90% of our target audience is already pretty sporty — whether running, biking, boxing etc. This is the reason why they can’t find time for yoga — they are just not willing to make it their primary workout.
Pain points:
- our target audience cares very much about health, stress relief, endorphins and the whole shabang
- they are willing to incorporate yoga in their lives but not as an exchange of their primary workout
- they are looking for an ease-down after their workout routine, so very much body oriented as well as a “head-break”, they are interested in the spiritual aspects of yoga
- they don’t know the different yoga types and don’t know which one could work for them
- again last but not least: they are a bit ashamed to show up in an in-person class because they don’t know what to do(over 40% of our users!)
User persona
How might we & Problem Statement
For our project, we defined our problem as:
How do I put Yoga in my life?
Annd we played around with affinity maps, brainstorms and other ways to kick off creativity!
Our Affinity map and ideation help us developed 3 “How Might We” as the goal to solve in our project:
HMW integrate yoga with other forms of exercise?
HMW help people pick the right style of yoga for their needs and schedule?
HMW make sure they do the poses correctly?
Wireframes and iterations
Once we established our goals and concepts, we began with wireframes. Each team member brought their own version to the table, and differences were discussed collectively before being presented in user testing and stakeholder meetings. We identified the need for screens with high visibility, accessible buttons, and clear audio instructions, particularly for users in unfamiliar positions. After gathering feedback and integrating the best ideas into a unified flow, we iterated on the wireframes multiple times whilst still receiving more and more feedback mostly regarding unclear features or functionality.
And that is how we started working our way out! Here you can see our iterations:
I think it is worth mentioning that our UI was based on the existing Bluebirds’ brand identity, as follows:
Therefore let me give you a quick explanation of the final solution:
We decided to give people a choice of what do they want to focus on today, their mind or their body. Since most of ours target users are athletes, we created an option of checking what have you trained today so that the application can give you the most effective flows depending on your todays activity as well as your time availability. There is a yoga poses library so that all the newbies can go directly into a specific pose and learn more about it. They can also see which poses have been used in the recent flow. There is also a “weekly review” section, where our users can track their progress as well as see what kinds of yoga they have been doing lately and which areas of your body you have trained.
After choosing a flow, the app transforms into a screen to deliver the yoga sequence. We understand at this stage that our user will be busy attempting the poses. At this stage, the app relies on an audio instruction and the visuals transition automatically from one pose to the next. The user can interact with the flow by doing an easy swipe gesture to control the experience. He can like, skip, go backwards and get written instructions through gestures.
Future possibilities
We were thinking about connecting an app with other sport trackers but after conducting research it turned out that our target group does not really use an app tracker. So we decided to implement it as a next step. There will also be a need of allowing our users to create their own yoga workout by linking their favourite poses from the library into a customed flow.
Why is this in my portfolio?
After a year of working and broadening my knowledge in UX/UI design I am looking at the interface and thinking “ what was I thinking”. Things are misaligned, there is barely any hierarchy etc. etc. Yet I still wanted to include one of this very first projects in my portfolio because I rememeber how much we have spent on the reasearch, how many key outtakes we got from it and how wrong we could have been if we went on with our assumptions. This was the time when I truly realized how good it is to ask “why?” at least five times.
