Yoga students and teachers struggle with at-home yoga. For this reason, both were considered for Yogabox. At-home yoga and fitness today is driven by video platforms. With this, students worry about misalignment and injury while practicing at home. On the other side, teachers are missing that personal connection with their students.

Many students and teachers started yoga for its physical benefits, to then discover its contribution to mental well-being. They found yoga an effective means of therapy and prevention. This is especially important for the target age group, as they voiced concern around physical mobility while ageing. Yoga was viewed as a lifelong practice focused more on improvement than achievement.

Within the wider competitor landscape there is an opportunity to create something new. This is both from an offering and personality perspective. The wider landscape includes wellness, fitness, physical therapy and tele-therapy. Wellness and fitness platforms are more content-driven, while therapy leans on personalisation.

Yogabox’s ‘unyoganess’, or break from the expected expression of yoga, helps to create a space without judgement. Yogabox contributes a new perspective to the wellness and fitness space by bringing a sense of approachability, optimism and interactivity to yoga. The name takes cues from both bento and subscription boxes, reflecting the modularity, convenience and personalisation.

With a new platform and concept, it is important to identify the right user flows to prototype. By mapping the red routes for students, I was able to identify the most used routes or key business drivers. Though some of the starred routes below are out of the frequently used by all zone, they are critical in portraying the platform’s long-term value to new users.

Students were the focus for conceptual app development. Getting started with the app, and continuing to use it while improving yoga alignment was important to understand. Five red routes (four student and one teacher) were explored, in addition to a site map specific to students. The most important aspects were clarity and ensuring the concept was immediate.

Throughout the interviews, personalisation was a key theme. However, this can be executed and understood in many ways. Through usability testing, it became clear the balance between personalisation and convenience, choice and simplicity, access and earnings. This was done through four rounds of usability tests, each with five users.

Yogabox brings together the convenience of practicing at home with the benefits of 1:1 instruction. Students are able to trial their personalised yoga classes, while understanding the value of the platform in the long-term. Personalisation comes through curated course modules plus purposeful 1:1 appointments.

It’s clear the app is about both the experience and program structure. By building out one hypothetical course, we could measure its engagement and effectiveness. This pilot phase would help to test the overall concept and whether both users find it worthwhile to use overtime. The lessons learned below can be integrated into next steps for the Yogabox.