Onyra/Mindclub
Feb 21 - May 21
At Onyra/Mindclub my task as the first UX Designer was to make the organisation more user centric by leading design thinking workshops and conducting user research. The aim was to both gain more visibly outwards and improve the already existing product.
When I joined Onyra/Mindclub, the service was already active. Onyra/Mindclub was aiming to position itself between meditation apps and a coaching service that would attract people who wanted more guidance, depth and community in healthy mind practices than meditation apps could give.
Even though with a heavy focus on meditation it was also aiming to follow a more holistic approach to healthy mind practices than a sole concentration on meditation, by including other personal growth tools. Joining the team I started off with a series of design thinking workshops that intended to make more concrete what problem Onyra/Mindclub was aiming to solve and what their hypothesis was. During our workshop sessions we came up with the following problem statement and hypothesis:
People could have a healthier minds, but lack awareness, guidance and motivation to achieve their potential.
By providing an overview, encouraging training, and tracking progress of well-researched tools or a healthy mind we can support curious minds to take agency of the potential for their minds.
At the same time the workshops also helped work out the most pressing areas within the user journey of Onyra/Mindclub. Most importantly these were visibility and user insights.
Having problem statement, hypothesis and the most important areas of work in mind it was time to start our research. Before we started this enterprise we hired another designer to support us in our work. While I was leading the workshops and the overall research strategy, Emily our new designer took care of conducting the interviews and sending out the surveys.
Our plan was to validate the problem statement and hypothesis by conducting 2 surveys and 2 interviews sessions, one each internally within the already existing meditation course, and one each externally with potential users. To be better prepared for this research I lead further workshops for us to work out the following 4 research goals:
Understand what is the driver and the motivation for people seeking a healthy mind
Find out how people currently approach their meditation and in general a healthy mind
Learn about the potential problems that people encounter trying to gain a healthy mind
Apprehend what else, beyond meditation, do people need to have a healthy mind
With these research goals in mind Emily and I created interview and survey questions. We started off sending out the surveys, both internally and externally. For the external channel we used platforms like Slack, Reddit, Facebook and Twitter.
Our main finding from this research was that while people often sought out resources such as applications (Headspace, Calm) or books to guide their meditation practice and routines, the proactive guidance and training was lacking to keep people working toward their healthy mind goals and furthering their practice.At the same time the shape of our target audience became clearer. Among the most important characterics were the following:
Millennial young urban professionals
They have a busy life with demanding work
They are struggling with stress and bad sleep
They already have a healthy mind practice like meditation, walking, breathing exercises, yoga etc..
They struggle to keep their practice up because they are lacking guidance and in many cases a sense of accountability and community
Especially people who had already joined the course were especially motivated by the communal aspect
They were hoping to get a clearer direction with clear goals for their personal development out of the course
The participants of the course had some concerns about the flexibility of the classes. So far every class was at 7pm every day. For many this was not flexible enough. They also wanted to have direct access to all the course materials online, which hadn’t been offered yet. All over they were looking for flexibility, but also a more goal oriented course, where they could better understand their next steps and current situation.
While the overall problem statement was validated by our research, we had to refine it a little and make it more concrete. The hypothesis similarly was going in the right direction but had to be refined and followed through more actively.
To achieve more participant satisfaction while also attracting more new course participants we gave a couple of recommendations, which were to be implemented in the existing course structure, but also had to do with the outward identity and visibility of Onyra/Mindclub. One of the outward strategies was to rebuild the website, which I also took care of.
Young urban professionals/curious changemakers would like to thrive in their mental wellbeing but often lack self awareness, guidance, structure and motivation to reach their full potential.
We can accelerate the thriving of mental wellbeing of curious minds by providing guidance, structure, awareness and motivation.
Online platform with all materials to be accessible
Improving engagement by sending out reminders and sending out a monthly survey
More flexibility with classes morning and evening.
Ramp up the community and guidance aspect, which is the main incentive for people to join the course. More direction in the course by putting emphasis on goal setting.
To gain more visibility increase social media presence by making frequent short instruction videos about meditation. Build youtube channel.
To improve conversion and visibility improve website
