to craft with intention
In our world of built objects and digital services, design serves a vital role. You experience this firsthand through your interaction with everyday things. On the flip side, your clients and customers also receive a layer information through the design of your product or service. A solid understanding of computer science principles elevates my design imagination. There is a sweet spot at the intersection of function and form. My path to this sweet spot is through connecting disparate topics together.
Yoga consists of sequences of movements designed to engage the body in an intentional way. If we take the example of an elephant’s gait: their footsteps are light when calm, yet they stomp and charge when enraged. The quality of movement conveys information.
Through yoga and mindfulness practice, I recognize how interpersonal communication can affect design. When I bring my authentic self to a team environment, others feel at ease to be their authentic selves (and vice versa); creating a safe environment for collaboration and innovation.
projectwhat is itA platform to serve the needs of yoga teachers who want to bring their offering online.
We share the cost of web services and software while building a community for teachers and students alike.
My roles: co-founder, UX, UI, brand, developer, operations, project manager
challengesCreate a unique visual identity with primary focus on teachers.
Build a platform that enables both livestream and pre-recorded classes. There wasn’t an existing turn-key solution.
Teachers have unique pricing models.
design processMy business partners gathered colours, fonts, and inspirational objects from nature.
Logo is based off a maple pod and a geometric cicada wing—themes of experimentation and potential for creative growth.
The front page of leelapod puts focus on the teachers (rather than the studio). With focus on the teachers, a challenge was to create a consistent brand identity with different sources of content (the photos submitted by teachers). Each photo is tinted with colours from our palette, giving a homepage a unified look and feel.
Individual teacher pages have all the essential elements needed to offer online classes along with rich imagery for personalization.
In the Video On Demand section, students first arrive on the page on the left. This layout is meant to reduce decision overload through clear categories and reduced number of options. The initial layout was similar to Netflix with many rows of categorized content. I decided to change it when we received feedback on decision fatigue.
emojis for class intensity
We originally had a heart scale (inspired by vitality in video games) but students confused it with rating
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buildWeb services and integrations: Squarespace, Aquity, Memberstack, Stripe, Zapier, Google Sheets
Languages: JQuery, JavaScript, CSS, HTML
operationsBusiness process automation (through integrations with Zapier and Google Sheets) reduces admin work by a large margin and allows the business to scale.
not shown: added complexity due to varying class prices (handled by price tables that match class name to prices) and tracking taxes
learning from dataWhen we first started creating content for video on demand (Sep 2020-Nov 2020), every video was 60 mins long (standard length of a yoga class). Data showed that students were only getting to the 50% mark (~30mins). We started to create classes with varied time lengths so students had more variety according to their energy levels and schedule. Completion rose to 70-75%.
For our livestream classes, we are transitioning to a bulk class model ie. students sign up for a month of classes, one class per week (ex. every Sunday of the month). This allows teachers to better plan classes and also helps students commit to a consistent practice.
more learningsThis project took me into very uncomfortable territory: Accounting 😱. Fortunately, we use pre-accounting software that uses machine learning to categorize a portion of our income and expenses that gets piped into our accounting software (though setting it up was a big learning curve).
In highschool, I almost failed Accounting but had high marks in Math and Sciences 🤷🏻
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