Top Artificial Intelligence Companies 2023Top AI Companies 2023Top Web Developers 2023Top Web Developers 2023PortalYogi is the biggest online yoga studio and the biggest online community for yoginis in Europe. They aim to help people enjoy their home sessions by providing them with an online platform to choose videos and practice at their favorite place.
When we started the project, PortalYogi was already the biggest online community for yoginis in Europe. They were big enough to feel the constraints of the available off-the-shelf solutions for fitness providers.
With a strong need to meet the expectations of their clients and the ambition to scale their business, they decided to build a custom yoga platform. To approach it right and make sure we focus on the right features, we decided to run a Discovery Workshop – a meeting where we analyze clients’ vision, goals, pain points, and requirements to help them create a product backlog and prioritize the features. The workshop helps us align project scope with the deadlines and make sure that the product’s end-users are getting value from the very beginning.
Working on an MVP, we want to bring a product to the market as fast as possible. For that, we need clear priorities.
It is equally important, though, to stay aware of what comes next. For that, we need a vision of what the ideal product should be.
What’s most important, however, is to make sure that the assumptions we have are correct. And who knows best what the ideal product should be? End-users.
The lockdown in 2020 was a huge accelerator for the digital fitness industry. Portal Yogi, being the biggest Polish yoga community, wasn’t an exception here. With many new users registering in the app, it was important to make sure that it would meet their requirements and that they would stay active.
When Portal Yogi was started, it was based on the off-the-shelf platform (Teachable). Although it was a great solution to validate business hypotheses and to grow users’ community, at some point, it wasn’t enough. It was clear that the tool’s limitations and lack of certain features supporting content discovery would quickly become a blocker for the company’s growth.
When Portal Yogi’s team approached us, they had a working business model, knew their client personas, and had great ideas for the future. Yet, their whole business depended on a 3rd party tool – which wasn’t a good foundation for scaling up. Our goal was to change it and give Portal Yogi more independence.
To ensure that the new platform responds to the pains and gains of the end-users, we’ve built a Value Proposition Canvas for two types of users: customers and admins. Thus, if any of the intended features would not be a pain reliever or a gain creator, we would know it’s not the right time to build it at the MVP stage.
We’ve learned a lot during the first two days of the workshops. We discussed the business model, analyzed client personas, went through industry benchmarks, and brainstormed the potential features. It was high time to design some low-fidelity mockups that we could use to confront our ideas with users. At this stage, we decided to design three core screens: the homepage of the platform with a search feature and a content overview, a page with the search results and filters that can be applied, and a user panel with some practice history & statistics, favorite videos and playlists.
User interviews consisted of two parts: individual in-depth Interviews and moderated usability tests. In the first part, we wanted to learn why our interviewees practiced yoga, what motivated them, what helped them stick to their routines, and what stopped them from doing it. In the second part, we presented them with our prototype mockups, giving some simple tasks and asking what they saw and how they liked it. Apart from learning how the users like our prototype, we wanted to know if it’s intuitive and easy to use.
By improving the platform’s usability, we made it more accessible for the users. The existing content is now easier to discover, and the analysis of the churn reasons showed that 10x less users drop because of UX-related reasons.
After one year from migration, the new platform has twice as many users as before. While this success is the result of the tremendous efforts of the whole Portal Yogi team, creating great content and running well-thought campaigns, it would be hard to achieve it on the old platform.
Even though we were focused on finding the simplest way to give Portal Yogi users the most value, we did not lose the long-term goal from sight. In order to align the product with the business strategy, we planned the platform’s architecture in a way that would allow the client to scale it up in the future.
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