Junto
Client: Clarvida
Clarvida is a health and wellness company that specializes in yoga, and reiki sessions, local to Toronto. Our client has spent years networking around the city and had discovered that unless a yoga instructor had a regular location, it was difficult for them to provide their service. The idea was born that Junto would connect yoga teachers with spaces.
The task was to create an easy to use location-based matchmaker, connecting yoga teachers with empty spaces, such as an art gallery, loft, or even church. The app would act much like Airbnb or Turo, having spaces reviewed and ranked allowing for better quality.
Initial Research
The team conducted preliminary research consisted of extensive online and field research (articles, yoga studio websites, etc) and stakeholders’ interviews, such as yoga teachers, yoga studios, yoga students, venue owners. They also looked at a variety of competitors, comparing their best practices. Overall we interview about 20 stakeholders and analyzed about 7 different competitors. They were able to quickly distill some key pain points to focus our user interview questions around.
For both yoga instructors and independent studios, financial stability is a struggle. Yoga instructors face fierce competition entering into the field due to an over saturation of yoga teachers. The 200+ hour entry yoga teacher certificate is a comparatively low investment to other career specializations. Most yoga teachers operate on a freelance model, with teachers often holding classes at multiple studios.
As a result, burn out is a common yoga teacher phenomena due to financial instability, lack of benefits and high emotional investment.
The most visible pain point is those junior freelance teachers are not able to teach at yoga studios. Reasons for such phenomena is because of yoga studios mostly profit from yoga teacher certification programs and are most likely to hire their alumni rather than a freelance teacher, because of a particular style and teaching techniques that are suitable to the particular yoga studio.
Therefore we asked junior yoga teachers about their experience of renting out spaces and their opinion on having a platform that would help them to streamline this process. Here is what the team found out:
Summarizing research about yoga teacher we created a Yoga Teacher Persona, an average target audience with her goals, frustrations and pain points.
Competitive/Comparative Analysis
Thinking of Junto as Airbnb for yoga teachers, we looked at multiple established platforms that use principles such as: renting of space, purchasing of class, listing space for rent, offering a deal discount on certain purchases, finding best-matched places nearby, etc.
We examined and compared companies’ best practices, paying attention to their problems and how they solve it, to usability and accessibility, to their branding and UI elements.
Iterations
Junto serves as a hub to connect teachers, venue owners and students. For the scope of the first phase, we will be focusing on building the app through solving the Teacher’s pain point. We decided to focus on two functionalities: the booking a venue as well as risk management for freelance teachers.
Final Design
