Yoga
Winter Semester 2020/21
Studio
Prof. Petra Müller-Csernetzky
People who start a yoga practice often feel lost and insecure about where to start due to the great number
of styles and lack of information, there are about over 300 million people in the world who practice yoga
and with thousands of people joining each year is considered one of the top 5 faster-growing practices.
This study aims to gather meaningful insights about personality type and expectations for new and
inexperienced yoga practitioners, that help them narrow the available options when choosing a yoga style,
based on interests, personality, and benefits of the practice.
To test our hypothesis that personality and personal interests have a decisive impact on how new users
perceive the practice of being suitable and beneficial for them, we focused on developing a tool that
tackles both their interests and expectations. Through an iterative process following the design thinking
methodology, we conducted interviews, surveys, and remotes usability tests with over 50 users
throughout the entire process in 3 different countries and with an age range of 18 to 45. Analysis of the
responses with qualitative and quantitative approaches demonstrated users gain clarity through an
awareness process of their motivations where they recognize diametrically inner and outer stimuli that
advise them on their first steps.
These results indicate that both inner and outer motivations have an impact on the selection process when
starting a yoga practice, on this basis, it is recommended to new practitioners to understand and reflect
upon their personals triggers before taking an uninformed decision. Further research is needed to prove
the effectiveness of whether our proposed solution successfully asset an answer that helps the beginner
practitioner keep up practicing the suggested yoga styles.