Overview

• Duration: 2 weeks
• Skills: Contextual Inquiry, User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Problem/Solution Statements, Rapid Prototyping, Figma
• Final Deliverable: Low Fidelity prototype

Explore and identify a current product, service or mobile application that could best benefit from utilizing virtual reality in a way that makes it more helpful for its users.

During 2020 a the COVID 19 pandemic caused many businesses to close down temporarily and in many cases permanently. While many yoga studios remain closed, many solutions have become popular, including YouTube channels and apps that help yogis of all levels to practice and teach from their own homes.

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Problem statement

People want to practice yoga in their homes in a way that benefits their mind and bodies. However, they are struggling to maintain a routine without the presence of a class, community or an instructor that will help them with aspects such as form and posture.

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Solution statement

Create a virtual reality yoga studio that makes full use of virtual reality technology to deliver a personalized experience of having an instructor that encourages routine, helps improve technique and has the ability to connect users with each other.

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Discover & Define

Contextual Inquiry

To begin the research phase I conducted 10 interviews, each lasting about 30 minutes. 80% of the participants were female, 20% male. I sourced a few of them from my friend and some from the Slack channels connected to our cohort. I used Calendly to set up the appointments and Zoom to record the responses to the following questions.

• How long have you been practicing yoga? Please tell me the story about how your yoga journey began
• How often do you practice yoga now?
• What motivates you to practice? What do you get out of it?
• Describe some of the benefits you experience from practicing yoga
• Tell me about the environment that you practice yoga in?
• Do you have a yoga instructor?
• Do you see yourself as part of a yoga community?

Collecting Data

The results of the recorded interviews were surprising. So much information came from simply asking each person to describe their personal journey into yoga. Sitting and listening intently, I started learning quickly that most people practiced yoga at home anyway regardless of the pandemic.

9/10 participants reported that they had trouble maintaining a sold routine

7/10 expressed how they felt the studio environment and studio classes helped improve their practice

6/10 mentioned that they had used technology to practice yoga during the pandemic

1 still attends the same studio that they did prior to the COVID 19 pandemic

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Key takeaways

Popular technology

I found that people did use technology and virtual yoga was definitely a thing already, the most popular by far being Yoga with Adriene on YouTube, I was really intrigued to understand why in particular this personality kept showing up in every conversation surrounding this project. It appears that there is a common sentiment that Yoga with Adriene and her homely, human approach to teaching that translates well through the virtual space.

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Not so popular technology

10+ downloadable apps with no clear leader and no recognizable soul. Four interviewees mentioned using apps and each time it was different one, the sentiment wasn't anywhere near as strong. I looked over a little deeper to see how many there were, looking back on this it would be interesting to do a feature inventory and see how they compare with each other.

Synthesizing Data

Looking through the transcriptions I was able to synthesize the results onto an affinity map which mostly separated the many reasons people enjoy yoga. Mindfulness, balance, stretching and flexibility were all scattered amongst everyone's feelings. People had no problem using technology, and it seems like they were having a difficult time with routine.

View full Affinity map in FigJam

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How might we?

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re-create the experience of a yoga instructor in the home environment?

encourage routine?

assist in the connection to a yoga community?

solve for the mindfulness component and physical benefits of yoga?

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Develop & Deliver

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User flow ideation

My next stage was to create a user flow and a paper prototype. For the user flow I downloaded the top 10 yoga apps for my Iphone and began sketching out their user flows. After six or seven user flow sketches I noticed some patterns.

View User Flow study in Figma

They definitely had options for a quick practice as well as a more goal oriented path that involved inputting information about your physical state and deciding what you might like to achieve. I also remembered that during the interviews, a few people had described in detail what they did when they practiced yoga, I had indirectly sourced their user flows and gained some insightful results.

View User Flow study in Figma

I also remembered that during the interviews, a few people had described in detail what they did when they practiced yoga, I had indirectly sourced their user flows and gained some insightful results. User 1 always experienced a check in process with the instructor where they were asked about injuries and areas of tension while User 2 attended a session where they were given time to ground and center themselves before class began. Both of these findings told me that there is a human centered objective, bringing them into a new calm environment where their bodies and minds are taken into consideration.

View User Flow Ideation in Figma

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The proposed user flow is a combination of the humanized user flows of my interviewees and the apps user flows of convenience.

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Early Iterations

Creating a prototype proved challenging. I’ve never actually donned a VR headset before, I could only assume they had some kind of universal interface with lots of variations. How was I going to start? Do I create my own? Should I pick one from a VR manufacturer and work from that? I started sketching my user flow into some landscape frames so that I could do a bit of testing and see if I could learn more from feedback, maybe it didn’t matter, maybe just a simple, clean and minimal aesthetic could be the way to go.

Exploring possibilities with VR

By using an app called Marvel, i was able to use some simple sketches and activate them into a crude working prototype. Hoping to gain feedback on what I had so far, I scouted out a few participants to test it out, only to be completely stumped by the first piece of honest criticism.

"I’m not sure how VR plays a part in this prototype"

I was quickly stumped by the first bit of honest feedback I received. How could virtual reality enhance or augment the experience?

To separate my product from the apps and the Youtube videos

I realized I was still thinking solely within the limitations of today’s technologies for a concept that could be developed way into the future. It was time to start using my imagination the way somebody might have in the early days of the internet and liberate myself from these constraints. What else can we imagine?

• sensory yoga mats with haptic feedback
• clothing and sensors that help analyze and correct poses and form
• breathing and heartbeat monitors
• artificial intelligence

A new direction

Inspired a case study I read while researching different VR headsets, I used the Oculus dimensions as a base for a  product where the user has the ability to show a virtual instructor that they have areas of tension, this can then trigger a flow of responses.

A yoga instructor plays a big part in my product, after all that’s what I am replicating with virtual reality, so I positioned my interface as if it was the yoga instructor interacting with the user.

The option to connect users with each other in a community also played into my final iteration

I was able to create multiple screens that communicated my ideas effectively, since so many users have a problem establishing routine, it's important to offer motivation, possibly by a reward system.

To be able to solve for the all users, be it physical, mindfulness or both aspects, a variety of sessions can be offered to all levels.

Overall this was a rewarding exercise in research. From the beginning it was always a challenge to create valuable research and ensure it was acted on in the final product. I learned a great deal about people and their habits as well as where virtual reality is positioned in its early stages and how far it has to go.

I have included a link to the clickable prototype here if you are having trouble, press Z to fit the screen

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Next Steps + Learnings

Overall this was a rewarding exercise in research. From the beginning it was always a challenge to create valuable research and ensure it was acted on in the final product. I learned a great deal about people and their habits as well as where virtual reality is positioned in its early stages and how far it has to go.

I'm not sure I want to take Virtual Yoga any further but I have since found some UI/UX classes online that have piqued my interest and will likely take this case study in a new direction.