Case study: bringing your yoga practice closer than ever

Hi there! Time for a third project at IronHack!

I did this project alone, with the help and support of my buddy, Arantja Rosalina.

Scope of the project: analyze an already existing and highly adopted app and incorporate a new feature into the existing product. The feature should be based on user research and should be an area of functionality to be explored.

I chose the Down Dog app for Android, the app I use to practice yoga. The opportunity was clear for me: improving people's lives by connecting yoga with their real lives and with others, taking advantage of any experience that is out there. Yoga has brought countless benefits to my life, and I would like to offer this opportunity to everyone who wants to try it out.

Before jumping into the process, I will give you a bit of context.

Yoga time

To understand the social impact of the yoga practice, we might need some numbers. There are around 300 million yoga practitioners globally, approximately 50% original from India.

Yoga practice has broadly extended in western countries since 1800 and has evolved since then. Even laughter yoga was invented in the '90s by an Indian medical doctor called Dr Madan Kataria.

Lately, COVID-19 hit everywhere, and yoga wasn't an exception. The statistics tell us that when COVID-19 started, there was a 154% increase in yoga material demand. Class reservations also increased. Instagram was a hot topic, rising by 68% in March 2020.

But, how is this going to evolver after the pandemic?

A study about the impact of COVID-19 in yoga practice showed that 60% of students indicated a preference for recorded classes, while only 36% of teachers said they preferred this format. (source: https://financesonline.com/yoga-statistics/)

Teachers are more hesitant to an online format for many reasons. One of them is the difficulties of knowing how your students are progressing, as it usually's more complicated to see and understand their postures.

However, there is a positive change in the attitude towards yoga online. A survey reports that 58% of students and 73% of teachers better perceive online yoga now.

So, what happened to those yoga teachers launching when covid started? Or who didn't have a regular class (gym teachers, beginners, different types of studio)?

You can stream classes with Zoom, but first, you need to reach an audience. On the other side, Instagram has good content but doesn't provide the tools to support a class with all its needs.

If teachers decide to continue with physical classes, the extra income provided by online courses might be a big help to their pockets.

Conclusion? There is a considerable gap in the market for these people.

I started to draw an idea in my mind. A tool where teachers could take advantage of available online tools, and students could quickly attend classes and have guidance. But there were still many things I needed to understand from the users and the app.

Let's go to the app!

DownDog Yoga has over 5 million downloads, and it's in mostly all the top 10 rankings for yoga apps. The app creates (almost) limitless combinations of postures so you can do a different class each time.

Asana Rebel is the main competitor, which has an option to share pictures by the app's users. Yoga Go is another competitor focused on losing weight.

Overall, all the yoga apps offer countless video options, such as DownDog, but none provides a space to share and connect closer with students and teachers. This point is an excellent opportunity for DownDog to grow and expand the business.

Validation

We all think our ideas are great, but first, it's necessary to validate and see if this could work.

I did four quick and informal interviews with people who used the app. I asked them for their experience with the app or others and shared with them my initial idea. I didn't give any details to see what they thought about the general idea.

Users want a space to share with others, have a closer relationship with the teacher and expand their practice to other aspects of their lives. At this point, I knew I didn't want only to create a feature to stream classes, but engage users by connecting the app with their lives.

Another problem I encountered was the quality of the content. How could I promote good content while allowing everyone to show their potential?

I decided to define my user personas to figure out better the people I was designing for and guide me through the process. I did proto personas as I had limited time to do research in-depth.

By clarifying my primary user personas, I could focus better on how to design the feature.

• Teachers are essential: they need the freedom to share their content, give classes, and show their potential. They could use the feature to complement their regular classes or as an independent income.
• High-quality content: There will be extensive profiles where reviews and followers will be visible to promote good content. Teachers will be able to share any content they desire to promote themselves.
• Connection to their lives and others: by bringing the yoga practice everywhere we want, we will take it to the next level. Yogis will have more motivation and engagement with DownDog.

Solution?

A space where formed or potential yoga instructors can profit through the app by reaching wider audiences and where people can learn and experience yoga.

Creation begins!

Before designing the lo-fi, I had a last exam at the app. The feature should have a smooth design and feel integrated with the rest of the app.

DownDog's interface is intuitive and easy to use. Scrolling and floating Windows are essential. Other elements are images in the background, putting less opacity in the UI elements.

There are rounded corners and two primary colours, blue as a brand colour and brown as a secondary, strong presence. The transitions between screens are smooth and subtle, making the user experience enjoyable. DownDog combines these elements that result in a minimalistic and simple design.

Sketching helped me to design the mid-fi in Figma.

Mid-fi testing

You can test the mid-fi prototype by clicking here.

Some clarifications:

• Reviews: the review system will be based on instructors and not classes. To encourage high-quality content is necessary to recognize and give value to the instructor and not isolate classes.
• Connect: not developed yet, but this will be the next step I mentioned before to connect yoga and the app with users' lives.

Time to test

I tested the mid-fi with three people and will resume here the information I got from them:

- Users found it confusing to have different text in the pop-ups. This information needs to be consistent.

- Pop-up with the text "you will be joining the waiting room" made them think they weren't able to join the class, so they would be on a waiting list to be accepted.

- Categories took a lot of importance on the main screen and made it more complicated to see through the whole screen.

- Getting more information about the teacher wasn't visible and easy to access.

I used Useberry testing with seven users, as I had good results in a previous project. I set some tasks such as joining a class or looking for information about the instructor.

After this testing, I got some conclusions:

• Users understood the main screen, but some clicked in the filter or out of the screen (bottom bar). I had to focus on being very clear when designing the hi-fi.
• Checking for instructor names wasn't clear. Some of them clicked on the text, which reinforced what I saw on the testing interviews.
• Pop-ups for joining a class at the moment was good in this case. Instead, pop-up to join a future class was confusing as people clicked everywhere. I would unify these designs for the hi-fi and make them clear and easy to understand.

Hi-fi design

How did I design this hi-fi?

I kept the minimalistic and simple design of the DownDog app, fonts and colours, and played with the background.

I used Figma plugins that I found extremely useful: Unsplash and Mapsicle. I also discovered the plugin Avatar generator for profiles and user personas.

I designed the main components and their variants to facilitate future work.

Before showing the hi-fi, a brief explanation of the changes.

People can share content on their profiles. Testers were curious about the instructors, so I wanted to show all their content on one screen to facilitate and concentrate all the necessary information.

Pop-ups are cleaner and easier to understand, and the categories section on the main screen has a lighter design.

I added a calendar option following the suggestion of one of the testers. Users who join different classes at different dates will have a schedule on their agendas to not forget.

Last but not least, I eliminated Q&A for not being necessary.

I also added a new screen that wasn't on the mid-fi. I couldn't resist!

Here is my prototype. Please go ahead, test and tell me what you think!

Hi-fi prototype video.webm

Conclusions and next steps

In the future, the new feature will allow users to log as teachers or students, enhancing the options for both groups and focusing on facilitating the process for teachers. This development will be done together with the web app to use DownDog on your laptop.

This project has been the first to work alone, and I enjoyed it so much. I could go through the design thinking process by myself and end designing the feature, which made me learn a lot.

There is also a dark side to the coin. A team will support the whole process. When someone is not going in the right direction, the team will drive to the correct one by thinking and discussing, identifying the pain points that one alone might not see. When you are alone and get stuck in the process, only you can fix it. There are countless benefits from working together with a solid team.

Designing in Figma has been very exciting. I enjoyed playing around with transitions and plugins, discovering more and more each day. There are loads of content provided by Figma on YouTube or their website that can help you progress in your learning curve.