Design thinking workshops
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:
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:
Criticism by course participants
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.
Refined problem statement and hypothesis + recommendations
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.
