Helping my Yoga teacher

And…here is another challenge taking part of the UX/UI design program at Ironhack !

Local shops and practitioners are suffering a decrease in the demand of their services and products due to the extreme situation COVID-19 pushed worldwide. This can affect local economies and many families. Alongside this, we can see true intent and a growing trend to support local businesses in many communities.

Online presence is a good way to hijack the issue. More and more professionals are on the verge of their digital transition.

Let’s help a local professional to improve its online presence to be more competitive in the current market.

I chose to help my yoga teacher who owns a studio called Septièmeciel.

What did we learned from my Yoga teacher?

Nadine, the owner of Septièmeciel Yoga, explains that she doesn’t have any website yet. For now, she communicates through Whatsapp to communicate the schedule.

Unlike all the hype yoga studios, Nadine offers a real deep experience. Her main objective is to help people aging with grace. You keep the practice/experience with you when the lesson ends.

Due to the current health crisis, Nadine can teach Yoga to 4 people maximum at the same time but her classes are rarely fully booked. However, the positive counterpart of this is that she is a better listener & can readjust everyone.

Flexibility is a very important concept to Nadine - at all levels :

• Pricing flexibility: the more we are, the cheapest the price - since COVID, Nadine reviewed her pricing. It’s now 20€ if there are 3 or 4 participants, 20€ if there are 2 and 60€ for a private lesson.
• Booking flexibility: in first intention, Nadine shares a course schedule proposal but she willingly changes it according to the availability of each.
• Practice flexibility: the courses have been built to be accessible to all - Nadine adapts in real time the practice depending on the audience. Moreover, she asks at the beginning of each class how the participants feel & what they are expecting from the lesson to adjust in real time the content accordingly.

Her main pain point is to deal with the booking process currently done via Whatsapp which is super time-consuming. She does everything manually & often needs to have one-to-one conversations.

The other paint point is the format of the schedule communicated via bullet points. Nadine insisted on the fact that sending the schedule once a week to her students is crucial.

Nadine also mentioned that she struggles to develop some of her current offer: the retreats.

“I’m not good at it at all”

Last but not least, Nadine thinks about creating new offers such as online videos (but not live!), handcrafted products she does herself, & advantageous offers when lessons bought in bulk.

& what about the users ?

In 2010, the French were 3 million to practice. 10 years later, they are 10.7 million (20.5% of the population), increasing by +300% !

The users’s objectives are related to :

• Physical and psychological well-being
• Pacification of the mind
• Taking active responsibility for one’s health
• Self-knowledge
• Ecological concerns
• Search for wisdom

Meet Emily, our user primary persona

From what we learnt from the Stakeholder & the user research, we built the primary persona below.

Emily is Head of Digital in a big company in Paris. Her main responsibility is to monitor & optimise digital solutions while having very short deadlines. She works a lot & must attend unpredictable meetings on evenings.

Goals & interests

• Dedicating time to her health.
• Finding a balance between her professional & personal life.
• Doing a second yoga lesson in a week.

Pain points & concerns

• Finding a Yoga teacher who takes scare about her community & offers flexibility as she has to deal with contingencies.
• Booking a yoga lesson that fits her schedule.

“I want to get rid of stress & feel better with a more regular yoga practice adapted to my hard work rhythm.”

Customer journey map

Problem statement

Septièmeciel Yoga students (like Emily Jolie) need a way to efficiently access information about yoga lesson availability because finding & booking the appropriate yoga lessons for their schedule is currently too complicated & time consuming.

Hypothesis statement

We believe creating a website for Septièmeciel Yoga students, that features a clear schedule & centralized online booking process with dynamic prices according to the number of participants will achieve better engagement, and thus a stronger online presence. We will know we are right if the number of registrations increases (goal: 28 participants a week).

User flow

Emily has lunch at her office, she is in a rush but she wants to book a Hatha Yoga lesson ASAP. It’s not her first time on the website, she already booked lessons in the past.

Lo-fi prototype

Mid-fi prototype

We came up with the final mid-fi prototype below that includes iterations from the patterns observed during the usability testing sessions:

“This is nice, very well designed”
“The process is quick, clear & easy as it should be”
“Less text & bigger”
“Inconsistency in the text sizing on the pop-in booking”
”Simplify the information about the dynamic price”

Emily lands on the homepage, clicks on the “book a lesson” CTA button. She lands then on the calendar page & selects the earlier Hatha Yoga lesson still available.

She has to login, & has the choice between 3 different authentifications: Facebook, Google or via an email. She clicks on Facebook & has important information to read & fill before booking the lesson. The price depends on the number of participants. She accepts & books her lesson.

A confirmation message appears to confirm the process.

And when coming back to the calendar, she sees that the lesson is well booked again and has the option to cancel it.

What’s next ?

As next steps, we will, first of all, increase the amount of referrals, via “Invite a Friend” CTAs throughout the journey, as the stakeholder insisted a lot on the fact that she wanted to keep an organic & word of mouth way to increase the community.

The 2nd priority is to help the stakeholder building a database of email opt-ins by giving opportunities to subscribe to the newsletter. In the same time, this will enables her to send the planning automatically on a weekly basis as required.

Next priority is to develop the retreats offer by integrating a solution that enables the user to do on-demand/made-to-measure requests.

Then, we could develop the e-shop with a click & collect solution.

And the last long-term next step would be to initiate the CRM strategy by enriching the users profile to get more information about them.

Thank you for reading my story :)