Ayuritual
AN END-TO-END MOBILE APPLICATION
Client
Ayuritual (Speculative)
Overview
The yogic community is turning towards Ayurvedic lifestyle changes to embrace everyday rituals, self-care, and mindful living. However, for an individual to gain knowledge and adapt to it, one has to take numerous initiatives and spend a lot of time getting to the right resources. Ayurituals app aims to bridge the gap and empower users to embrace Ayurveda.
Role
Research, UX and UI Designer
Timeline
8 Weeks
Tools
Figma, Canva, Zoom, Miro
The Problem
The idea for this project started with the pain point I was trying to solve for almost 2 years. When trying to embrace Ayurvedic rituals in my lifestyle, I’ve often struggled to find practices for my dosha (mind-body constitution) or the current season.
Even on the most determined days, I see myself spending 30 - 40 mins referring to various books, blogs, and videos to land on the right content.
While a consultation with an Ayurvedic practitioner is helpful to kick off the change, the everyday guide was the missing piece for staying empowered and motivated.
Design Challenge
how might we integrate ayurvedic practices and rituals into an everyday routine
The Solution
Personalized Suggestions, On-Demand Resources, Community, Live Sessions & Consultation… all in one place
This app aims to integrate Ayurveda into users’ lifestyles smoothly by:
providing just 3 easy ayurvedic rituals (Ayurituals) each day for users to practice and integrate.
the Kula (community), Livestream (group practice), an option to book virtual one-on-one consultations help users to stay supported and motivated throughout their journey.
The overarching notion is that, over time, they can evaluate what works best for them and what does not, to craft a routine that suits their lifestyle.
Design Process
01. Empathize
Research
I started this research with an open mind. While my pain point was the starting point for this project, I want to make sure that I listen to target audience to understand their goals and frustrations, and gather information from SME to create an app that is practical and useful.
Subject Matter Expert (SME) Interview
To gain knowledge about common everyday Ayurvedic practices that can be integrated in everyday life, I interviewed an Ayurvedic health counselor in Boston, MA. Through the interview, I understood that Ayurveda (which means “science of life”) goes in-depth on the roles our mind, emotions, and energies play on our health, and to achieve the benefits, Ayurveda offers diet and lifestyle practices which require constant and steady self-observation. The practice takes a lot of patience, strong determination, and most importantly, hand-holding through each step. This validates the need for an app to support users who embark on the journey.
Key Takeaways
Habit Forming
As habits hinge on each other, forming new habits can be overwhelming and burnout is imminent.
Design decision:
Offer easy to integrate habit/ ritual in a bite-sized format. Once the users see how it changes their overall health positively, they’ll come back for more.
Relationship b/n Self and Environment
Ayurvedic practices are rooted in the relationship between the humans and their environment, and diet, workout, and even sleep cycles should follow the seasonal rhythm.
Design decision:
Offer Seasonal practices [ tag resources, provide seasonal recommendations, add seasonal collections]
Do It Yourself vs Expert Guidance
While most of the basic diet and lifestyle practices are do-it-yourself, some of the practices require expert guidance and hand-holding.
Design decision:
Provide Consultation feature to book appointments with ayurvedic health experts
Provide a feature to “ask a question” to experts through tags on the community page.
User Interviews
I interviewed 3 participants between the ages 16 and 50 to understand:
How users integrate a new habit in their lifestyle, and they make it long-lasting
How they’d obtain information about practices to embrace
What pain-points should a hand-holding mobile application address, and how can it support their journey
Key Takeaways
Community is key
All three users mentioned that having a supportive community is a key factor in integrating new habits and making them stick.
Design decision:
Create a community page
Offer consultation options
Offer options to practice yoga/meditation live with the community
Minimal & Actionable
The suggestions that the app offers should be minimal and least disruptive of their schedule and lifestyle
Design decision:
1-3 easy to integrate tasks each day based on the season or personal dosha (mind-body constitution)
02. Define
Persona & Storyboard
Based on the above research, I created a persona representative of Ayuritual app users.
Meet Claire, a 40-year old working mom based in Boston. She recently learned about the Ayurvedic lifestyle and initial consultations with a practitioner benefited her. She now wants to integrate more rituals in her routine without abruptly changing her schedule.
Persona Representative of Target Audience
Storyboard for Claire. Integrating Ayurveda in her lifestyle
Project Goals & Feature Roadmap
Gaining insights from research, and defining the user persona, I drafted goals for users and stakeholders. After project goals are set, I’ve laid out a feature roadmap considering user needs and stakeholders’ priority and resources to design a Minimum Viable Product.
Business & User Goals
Feature Roadmap
03. Ideate
App Architecture
Since the app will host many different features and contain resources under various tags, it was challenging to map out an effective way to organize content. I started by sketching different ways of organization and digitized the one that made more sense to me. The efficiency of this layout will be tested with users later.
Application Map
Task Flow
To understand how users will navigate the app to complete different tasks, I’ve created task flows.
This also helps to identify pages to be designed to test the app with users.
Task Flows
04. Design & Prototype
Low Fidelity Sketches & Wireframes
After drafting the app architecture and task flows, I explored page layouts through sketches and created low-fidelity wireframes.
Exploratory sketches
Mid Fidelity Wireframes
Branding
The branding aims to invoke a Clean, Minimal, Earthy, Flushed Feel. It represents some or more aspects of ancient Indian roots, where Ayurveda originated. To achieve that I’ve experimented with including Sanskrit letters in logo design. Further, it was my personal preference to add the Sanskrit word “kula” meaning community in the navigation.
The navigation link icons are simple overlapping geometric patterns that go hand-in-hand with the overall brand feel and design.
To further develop the visual style, I created the UI kit incorporating logo design, icons, color palette, typography, and component designs for the Ayuritual app.
Ayuritual- UI Kit
High-Fidelity Wireframes
Select High Fidelity Screens
Prototyping
After finalizing the visual design and flow of the app, I created a prototype to accomplish my initial “how might we” question. I used this project as an opportunity to improve my prototyping skills in Figma, and experimented with micro-interactions and adding a .gif file.
05. Test
Usability Test
Tasks
Task 1: Sign up for a live yoga session “Grounding Yin”
Task 2: Attend an upcoming session from the Today page
Task 3: Book a consultation with Ayurvedic Practitioner, Anjum Nayak
Task 4: Add a post to the “Kula” page
Task 5: Look for a Fall recipe named “Sakthi chai” from Library
Task Completion
Error Free
Testing Notes
Kula Terminology: All participants understood what Kula means, although they did not know the exact meaning. Words used to describe kula were “social feed”, “forum”, “discussion space”, and “support group”.
Homepage: 3 participants were confused with the suggested “Winter Collection” and “For Pitta Dosha” collections on the Today page. In my iteration, I changed the content.
Consultation tab: All participants were able to locate the consultation tab and successfully book a consultation
Recipes: 2 participants were confused with finding recipes in the library. While they completed the task, it took a while for them to navigate. This is partially a limitation of the prototype, as they’d prefer to do a search and in reality, the users could find the recipe.
Revision: Today Page - Before (Left) and After (Right)
Priority Revision #1
Based on the observations and feedback, I iterated on the “Today” page, to remove suggested collections, and instead added the “Recents” and “Saved” tab
Priority Revision #2
Add dosha tags and save/heart icon to Sakthi Chai Recipe page, so users can identify if the diet is suitable for their dosha (mind-body constitution) type, and add resources to “Saved”
Revision: Recipe Page- Before (Left) and After (Right)
Next Steps
Create Onboarding Screens:
If I were to continue to develop this design, I would want to create and test onboarding screens. Since the user flow and terminology is new, I would want to create more visual instructions to help new users to the app and Ayurveda upon launch.
Listen to the users:
Due to time constraints, I wasn’t able to test the prototype after iterations. I want to reach out to more users to understand their frustrations and validate my hypothesis with more A/B testing.