Dance class subscription app — UX Case Study
The Challenge
Overview
The client was an early-stage founder who took part in Founder Institute, the world’s premier pre-seed accelerator, in London.
The client’s idea was an app that would help people interested in building a new hobby or skill, find local instructors that match their preferred teaching style and/or performance level.
The client wanted to validate the target market for this idea and develop an initial prototype to test the potential solution.
The Process
Empathise
The problem the client initially wanted to solve was the difficulty in discovering and pursuing instructor-led recreational activities, as most current platforms lacked enough instructor-related content for prospects to make more informed decisions, leading to higher turnover for schools and/or studios. Given that the client was indirectly making their own assumptions, such as the importance of the instructor for example, user research was required to gain an empathetic understanding of the problem.
I started the initial research with a competitor analysis to know the strengths and weaknesses of the competition in order to better understand where the conceptual solution would stand in the market.
From this research, it became clear that the recreational and boutique fitness market in the UK was heavily saturated with platforms such as ClassPass, MoveGB and PayAsUGym all having an established customer base and similar value propositions. I followed up by talking to some users of these platforms, with most citing high levels of satisfaction and a reluctance to change platforms.
Given this, the client decided to pursue a very familiar, yet large enough market, namely, recreational dance.
To validate the problem within this market, I conducted several semi-structured interviews with a range of both dance students and instructors to better understand their needs, pain points and opportunities for improvement.
Define
After analysing and synthesizing the interview notes, I gained real insights into users and their needs.
Having learned the above, I was able to redefine the problem statement in a human-centred manner:
“How Might We improve the discovery of emerging dance instructors by prospective dance students looking to learn a certain dance?”
I also learned a lot about the user that expressed having this problem the most, and represented them in the persona shown below.
I subsequently designed the customer journey map for the same persona to help visualise their overall experience with the problem we were trying to solve.
Ideate
With all this information synthesized, we then ideated all the possible features of a mobile app solution that would help address the target user’s frustrations. To ensure we were creating a minimum viable prototype, we collaboratively listed and ranked the features against two factors “value to instructor” and “value to user”. As a result, I only designed the features that were mainly plotted on the top right quadrant of the prioritisation matrix, as these were deemed to be of high value to both instructors and users.
Before moving on to designing the low fidelity wireframes of the app, I created the user flow for finding and booking a dance class, to ensure the core features identified earlier were all contributing towards a seamless user experience.
Prototype
Now that the steps in the user flow had been laid out, through wire-framing, I began defining how the content on each screen should be organised and how these screens can fit together in a way that is intuitive to users and allows them to reach their goals, in this case of finding and booking a dance class.
Then, in an attempt to identify the most desirable and viable solution for the problem statement defined earlier, I produced a low-fidelity prototype and tested it with people that either represented or were as close to as possible to the target persona.
Test
Based on the usability tests, I made the following iterations to the designs:
1. Users didn’t find the ability to follow a dance category that useful and instead wanted to go straight to the instructor videos, making the 2nd screen from the left shown above redundant.
2. Users mentioned having the option to save a video valuable, as they could later review their favourites when they feel ready to make a purchase. So I added a bookmark icon below each video to enable this functionality.
3. Users expressed frustration that each video post directed them to a single class page and instead, wanted an easier way to access the schedule for all classes a given instructor offered. Given this feedback, I added a list of all available classes in the “About the classes” section, and changed the Call-To-Action (CTA) from “Book class” to “View Schedule”.
By incorporating user’s feedback, I designed a high-fidelity prototype which will further be tested and allow for further iterations to be made accordingly.
Final Designs
Explore and Search
Having the ability to do exploratory and targeted search for dance classes, is useful for both people who know what they’re looking for and those who don’t and are seeking inspiration.
Video Feed
A simple, intuitive video feed helps assess instructors’s teaching style and performance, enabling prospective dance students to make a more informed decision.
Instructor Profile
A dedicated profile page gives emerging dance instructors the exposure they need to attract new and more students. It also makes them more easily discoverable.
Outcomes and Learnings
The Result
The client was satisfied and recognised the value in the user-centred design process that I used. They were particularly pleased with the fact that they had research and insights to justify every decision they made, from changing the target market they were serving, to what the user experience of the solution should look like. They were also delighted that they had a high fidelity prototype to further test, along with a style-guide in order to maintain consistency across future iterations.
Lessons Learned
Because I had worked on a similar idea in the past, I already had a certain perception of the problem and hence a set of cognitive biases about user behaviour. So, the challenge was to become mindful of these and prevent them from creeping up in both the user research and subsequently the product itself. The way I overcame confirmation bias for example, was by labelling out all assumptions I was making, and developing hypotheses to disprove these as oppose to proving them. I also delivered user interviews using the 5-Why’s framework to find root cause of people’s behaviours.
