all projects
OHM Center
Lead 0-1 design for mindfulness mobile app
duration
5 months
team
2 engineer
1 product manager
role
ux research
interaction design
visual design
deliverables
project brief
hi-fi prototypes
design system
OHM Center is a mindfulness institute based in NYC offering mantra chanting lessons with different levels. In 2023, they had a drop in revenue due to learners not committing to the full lesson progression. Expanding the business digitally was essential to their business growth.
Why did learners have a hard time committing? I spearheaded the process of digitizing OHM Center as the founding product designer to discover insights and address both the business and the user problems.
problem
Keeping up with chanting takes too much time and effort
After conducting stakeholder and user interviews, I found out that:
User Problem
Learners shy away from taking more advanced lessons due to lack of time and way to retain knowledge.
Business Problem
OHM needs a way to retain existing users as a solution to their revenue.
user interviews
Difficulty to chant at home without guidance
To further understand why learners are having a hard time committing to taking classes, I interviewed with 8 current learners who either already taken classes for a year or more, or taken only 1-2 classes. Some insights that I've got:
Insight #1
New learners are intimidated by the religious notion behind mantra chanting
Insight #2
Learners need daily practice to get better – one-hour classes in person are not sufficient
Insight #3
Advanced learners have no way to learn the rich background behind mantra chanting.
From these insights, I notice an overarching theme that all learners love the in-person experience but find it hard to commit enough time to level up as a chanter.
Reframing it as an opportunity
How might we recreate the in-person OHM class experience digitally?
participant research
Scoping down the flow for MVP
Based on the stakeholder's explanation of mantra chanting, I created a hypothesis of the chanting flow to have an understanding before I take a chanting class.
Afterwards, I took 3 different classes of 3 levels of mantra chanting: beginner, intermediate and advanced to verify the hypothesis. This helped me restructure the flow as below and scope down the project being mindful of our short timeframe.
design exploration #1
Personalized chanting with guidance
