YOUR NEW YOGA TEACHER: A NEW GAMIFICATION CONCEPT ENCOURAGING REGULAR PRACTICE

We are happy to present our solution to the Wellness Institute

The wellbeing and health industry has been experiencing disruption for more than a decade due to advancements in technology. Today’s citizens are adopting activity-tracking technologies and other wearable products. Smartphones have more than ever before spawned a huge mobile market for health and wellness applications.

Wellness mobile apps are becoming more and more popular, as indicated by the fact that Calm, the popular app announced that it had reached 50 million downloads by mid-May 2019, a nearly twofold increase in one year (Les Echos Entrepreneurs 29.05.2019).Ahmad Khalaf and myself, MurielChaizemartin worked over ten days on this duo project.

The Wellness Institute is our client. The wellness center has decided to explore how they can leverage technologies to help people live a healthier life. The institute defines wellness as an active process through which people try to improve or maintain their well-being. But they noticed that despite the vast availability of metrics tracking and wellness apps, people continue to fight against themselves.

We conducted research about yoga and meditation and related topics that gravitate around. Yoga and meditation are huge trends.

As an example, in France, 2.6 million is the number of French people who declare having practiced Yoga at least once in the last 12 months and 1.5 million French people who do not practise sports say they want to practise Yoga over the next 12 months according to The Yoga Barometer 1st edition of the study carried out by OLY Be and the Sport and Cycle UNION — March 2019.

As well, “supported by an increasing number of scientific research papers quantifying its effects, meditation, often called mindfulness, generated $1.2 billion in revenue last year.

Four in 10 adults in the United States say they meditate at least weekly, and major companies including Google, Apple, General Mills, Goldman Sachs and Aetna have adopted meditation programs for their employees”(from Issue: The Meditation Industry from SAGE Business Researcher published the January 29, 2018 by Hannah H. Kim).

We established our primary research by combining quantitative and qualitative approach that is to say a survey and interviews.

We send a survey to different groups of yoga and meditation practionners and received more than one hundreds answers.

From our survey results, emerged the following trends :

And more importantly that these apps are usefull to them :

In a second step, we conducted the classic five user’s interviews with the Job To Be Done method.The Jobs-to-be-Done interviews method has a specific goal — to gain a deep understanding of the job the customer is trying to get done. When conducting these interviews, the focus must be solely on understanding the core functional job the customer is trying to get done, not on the buying process, customer behavior or the product. It’s all about context. From the Empathy map we used to download the data, three downpoints stands out:

We then explore how the Institute of Welness can leverage technologies to help people live a healthier life. From the exploration, the same trends emerge from the qualitative & quantitative analysis and they can be summarized by this quote :

Consequently, we integrated our primary and secondary research and combine the quantitative and qualitative insights :

• the fact that apps are generally too expensive
• The frustration in the lack of feedback
• Tiredness is an obstacle to practice

From these facts, we formulate our goals :

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By pairing by group of two to increase the efficiency of the divergent phase, we organise and prioritize HMW statements in order to pick a target and reduce the scope.

After dot voting on he combination of worst ideas turned into best, we come up with the two best ideas described below :

• the more you practice the less you pay for yoga classes
• give he users real time feed back via video to help them reach the perfect pose

Through those two ideas, we began our iteration for each concept separately using 2 rounds of Crazy8 to perform in order to iterate separatly each idea with the most possible possibilities for the app we will create for the Wellness Institute. This creative exercise allowed us to come up with interesting ideas, which we reformed into concepts of features that we prioritize using the MoSCoW method.

As our app is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), we now have to focus on the selected features that represents the core of the application.We decided to implement solely yoga at first for MVP.We combined the following features for our final solution:

A free yoga app that allows you to :

• book a yoga session,
• track progress by regular practice and takes in account your level,
• rewards you for regular practice through a counting systems that give you karma awards points for completing the session and maintaining your level.

At this stage of the design thinking process, we achieved complementary primary research that leads us to decide to combine those two features : instead of displaying only numbers on a dashboard which can be quite judgemental and disheartening, we choose the path of gamification to encourage our happy yoggy Guillaume.

At this point , we had a clear idea of the organisation of the content and of the information architecture, we include the users, iterate our ideas and test them by creating the Happy Yoggy flow that we will hep us wireframe for our usability tests.

From the wellness ecosystem scoped by this project , we set up the user flow and get focus on the happy path of practising regularly with the example of booking the yoga class for Guillaume.

For our low-fi and mid-fi wireframes, we designed simple yogi prototype with a hint of what this yogi app will taste.

We conducted usability tests. By using with our yogi medium-fidelity prototype, our six happy users encountered several problems, which we iterated.

From the testing feedback, here are the main corrected actions we conducted :

• a back button was added
• on the yoga specific section screen, practioner’s points were displayed for better understanding instead of displaying the next session ( session 3)
• on the the profile screen, for accessibility, we put the labels outside the cards
• icons were designed bigger for the same reasons.

For more acccuracy, here are the improved wireframes :

Through our elaboration of the Happy Yoggi universe and from a gut feeling, we had in mind and visualise a refreshing pink combined with purple or a darker violet that conveys our brand identity and both hues corresponds to a gentle pastel palette with vibrant accents.
Pink symbolizes youth, good health, and playfulness which are the emotional notes we wish our yogi audience to feel as well as the sensation to enter in a safe place where they can relax and grow in their practice.

In a nutshell, our yogi moodboard transmits the willingness to embrace wonder and creativity of the yoga practice

From the moodboard, we aimed at finding brand attributes that would convey the broad scope of emotions and feeling that conveys our MVP aesthetically :

• serenity
• simplicity
• spirituality

After establishing our moodboard and yoga attributes, we set up our Happy Yoggi style tile before creating our high-fidelity prototype.

We are now happy to present Happy Yoggy, our solution for the Wellness Institute :

First,you can have a glance at the high fidelity wireframes for our 3 main pages and finally display the prototype :

Finally, we performed a desirability test to check if our prototype aligns with our vision : Friendly, Spiritual, Smooth, and Sincere was the outcome we received and corresponds to our brand attributes : serenity, simplicity and spirituality.

To conclude, for our Happy Yogi application, the next steps will be :

• to set up the meditation path as well as the focus path
• to test, iterate and refine again for usability and desirability
• to transfer the versatility of encouraging lotus rewarding counting system to the whole range of app of the Wellness Institute especially to a new fitenss app combined with health diet cooking

Feel free to comment on the subject : Ahmad and I will be delighted to receive your feedback.