Hot Yoga Brickell
Case Study | e-commerce
Hot Yoga Brickell — A website revamps and user flow.
We all have different ways to rest our minds and body. Yoga indeed is not an exception for many people. We interviewed 35 people, of which 14% are into this practice, taking 3rd place in the survey, behind boxing and conventional gyms. Most of the users usually book classes in-person followed by apps and websites.
About the business
Hot Yoga Brickell is a Yoga studio specialized in Bikram Yoga offering 60 and 90 minutes sessions of purely physical exercise and meditation located in the heart of Brickell, Miami, Florida where there are at least 4 competitors in the 7 miles radius offering this discipline.
Goal
By conducting a deep business analysis, research, user testing, and prototyping, my goal was to create a better user flow to improve the user experience at the time to purchase a membership.

Setting the Scope
Many of us before deciding where we would like to join as fas as a sports facility, we may consider many aspects previously to make a decision. Either is a friend’s recommendation, word of mouth or we look up reviews online. I would say that digital presence it’s highly important as for business as for consumers, especially for upcoming generations.
Hot Yoga Brickell is known for its outdated digital presence and confusing website. I gave myself the task to ask some people their thoughts while navigating through their website and as well, doing secondary research taking a look at reviews left on Google and Yelp.
Some of the responses were:
“Great place for Hot Yoga.”
“Doesn’t make sense to find memberships under prices. It’s a bit confusing.”
“They never answer the phone. It’s really hard to reach out to them.”
“This bicycle logo does not make sense.”
“I would like to have a little more information about my classes.”
“Is this website even real?”
“This place has great reviews.”
As we see, it was not only about the aspect of the website but also this is a recognized placed to practice Bikram Yoga offering great classes but weak costumer service. This leads us that users won’t even consider to join the gym and putting their credit card details to purchase a membership.
I would also like to mention that Hot Yoga Brickell utilizes MINDBODY SAS that in my opinion, could be given a better use of it for a positive impact on the business.
Utilizing its API to render schedule and instructors dynamically. It is important to mention that one of the strongest competitors uses the same software.
The Actual Research and Discovery
MoSCoW — from primary and secondary research I concluded that it is important that the site must be mobile-first, as for our online survey results, users 97.1% use mobile phones for booking, shopping, reading, etc.

I asked some users to navigate through their website. Their feedback was really helpful to come up with good ideas on how to improve the website’s navigation.

As we can see here, this is how the current website navigation looks like and to actually see classes and memberships we have to go all the way to the right.
Navbar / prices / products
User task
As I was interviewing some users to guide us through their first impressions, we discovered that it was really confusing for them to find information. Also, I asked to review a competitor website and the result was expected. They did not trust Hot Yoga Brickell.
“Websites like this would deter me from reaching out to a studio. ”
Comparing competitors’ websites

As we can see here, on the chart of our left, Hot Yoga Brickell’s website, for sure, has most of the information needed for the business but the distribution and the approach are not effective.
For this task, I will focus on the main purpose of having an e-commerce website.
And with the help of “Healthy Heather,” we were able to determine the user’s pain points, gains, and journeys at the moment to look for a place.

Which led us to our User Journey:

Where we could identify three main pain points:



Now, how might we…
- help reduce customer confusion regarding information while visiting the website?
- end the users’ frustration by reducing the number of clicks to get to the information they want?
- also, help the business to increase sales through its website?
Our job would be to facilitate the information by intuitive design so they can easily look for classes, memberships, and schedules.
AH-Á! moment
After observing the user’s behavior while using the website and analyzing it, we realized that there are tons of opportunities that are important to take into consideration:

Sneak a peak of current website:















As a result, by creating a better experience when the user decides to buy a membership, first will have to believe in the website to build trust towards our goal to make them enroll in the studio.
So, here is my approach,
I broke down the website into different components, like “about us”, “classes”, “products”, “other services”, and“contact”. Inside those, there are categories that will fit according to the information:
- Home / About us / Story/ Amenities
- Home / Classes / Description / Instructors / Schedule
- Home / Memberships / Services
- Home / Retreats / Description / Services
- Home / Contact / Location
- Home / Cart / View cart
For the purpose of this task, I will focus on Memberships

I created these low-fi wireframes that will give me a sense if the user was responding positively with this new arrangement:



As a result of my first iteration:



With this, I learned that even though these are low-fi wireframes, they still need to be very well done to avoid drops and have more accurate testing results.
However, the re-arrangement was still a success! — Check out the Low-fi prototype here.
As a result, here is the new proposal, for the website revamp, given the task to facilitate user’s membership purchase:

Home / Memberships / Add to Cart / Check-Out / Order Summary / Credit Card Details / Receipt

Check out the Mid-fi prototype here.
Success and Failures
Of course, this is a prototype and much more work is needed to improve this business website, we will know if we succeed if:

Takeaways
It is important to create well design paper prototypes, once done, proceed to the rearrangement of website navigation.
Marketing in UX research is key to business development.
- USERS FEEDBACK
- STAKEHOLDER INPUT
- MAKE IT HAPPEN!
Cheers,

If you would like to make it happen and collaborate on a project, check out my repo here! 👾
