Case Study: Face Yoga App
Lifts your face and your mood up.
UX/UI training project: “Your client: a Wellness institute wants to develop a new app. Choose the topic and create a MVP”
July 2020–10 days
Role: We partnered up with Lucie Lépine and worked remotely on the Market and user research, Feature priorization, wireframing, prototyping, usability testings, UI design.
Tools: Mural, Sketch, Invision, Zoom, GMeet.
Very often, with all our best will to be healthier, we download that promising fitness app, use it once with mild success, and…never use it again. Let’s challenge that habit.
Curious about Face Yoga, we chose to develop a concept to make the up-and-coming natural alternative to relaxation and anti-aging remedies not only useful but also engaging.
Our challenge with Lucie Lépine was to come up with features and looks that will encourage users to commit to the practice.
Researches
To determine a direction for our product and understand better the pain points users might face, we first focused on collecting quantitative and qualitative data:
- Secondary research to learn more about the practice itself and the existing market (app, YouTubers, cosmetic brands…),
- Online survey to see if there were patterns in the user’s habits,
- Job-to-be-done interviews to dig deeper and learn more from face yoga practitioners.
Our key finding regarding the proven effects of Face Yoga was found in a report from The Journal of the American Medical Association of Dermatology:
In 2018, they conducted a clinical trial to assess facial exercise as a modality for improving skin appearance. It showed that 30 minutes facial exercises daily maintained for 20 weeks made participants appear on average to be three years younger.
This led us to define a real proven objective backed up by science-based-facts.
/Problem statement/
We created an empathy map with all the data collected and came up with those 3 interrogations to solve:
- How might we prove effects and results of face yoga?
- How might we make users enjoy embarrassing situations?
“I would be uncomfortable if somebody walks into the room and see me doing it”
- How might we propose the right exercises according to every user’s goals?
> 38% practise to muscle their face
> 50% practise to look younger
> 65% practise to relax
We defined our Problem Statement as followed:
Users who want to have more beautiful skin need to feel and see the effects of their practice because they need motivation to follow the practice for 20 weeks.
/Solutions/
The ideation phase led us to 20 different ideas for this app. But to pick the features we will develop, we went through 3 stages of prioritization and selected 3 of them :
- Feature 1. VIDEO CONFERENCE WITH FRIENDS (OR COACH)
- Feature 2. PROGRESS BAR & EFFECTS TO TICK ALONG
- Feature 3. SELFIE EVOLUTION TRACKER
From these 3 features, we created 2 mid-fi user flows.
In the first one, the user can invite their friends to practice via video conference. The feature helps the user not to give up on the challenge by practising with friends and therefore embrace the social awkwardness of face yoga.
In the second one, users can see progress thanks to different categories to track in and out result and keep up the motivation:
- Progress bar
- Ticking list of feelings and effects
- Visual evolution overtime thanks to a selfie gallery
The usability tests we ran with our mid-fi prototype showed some architecture information and wording issues in our first flows. Before going further to hi-fi wireframing, we re-thought and re-ordered parts of it.
/Visual identity/
We created a cheerful, joyful and fresh moodboard to enhance the playfulness of the practice.
With face yoga, users are shaping their face so we went for a creative direction with abstract shapes and artistic lines. For the palette, we selected solid bold tones to contrast with softer natural skin shades.
We put our moodboard and style tile into assessment with a desirability test that confirmed our choices. In 5 seconds, the users considered the designs to be: playful (71%), trendy (43%) and friendly (43%).
/Hi-fi Prototypes/
/Next steps/
We had a time constraints of 2 weeks to deliver and as it was such an exciting project rich of user insights, there are many next steps to take on!
Those below are the ones we prioritized:
Next steps for a MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
- Wiki·face: Create an encyclopaedia page of effects definition
- Privacy: Allow participants to mute themselves and to decide they want to connect their camera or not
- Profile page: Develop profile to register to save data and create a community
Next features we want to work on
- Diagnostic survey: to help user to choose the best program for them according to their expectations and goals. Eventually it could be a tailor-made program.
- Effectiveness: Metrics & user review on effectiveness for each exercise according to our three categories (Relaxation, Rejuvenate, Face fitness)
- Favorite exercises: Possibility to save favorite exercises in the profile page
Thank you for your attention, if this post sparked a development idea in your entrepreneur mind, feel free to contact us, we love the idea, and we would be pleased to see it IRL.
I hope you enjoy following our process as much as I enjoyed working with Lucie, a very talented and thoughtful UX/UI collaborator ;)
