Hot 8 Yoga's app made it hard to find and book the right class. Through competitive analysis, user research, wireframing, and a fully annotated hi-fi design, I redesigned the experience to reduce friction and give the brand a visual identity worth keeping.
Hot 8 Yoga is a well-established yoga studio chain in California with 9 locations. Their app serves as the primary booking channel — but the experience wasn't designed around how students actually search for and select a class.
Post-COVID, the fitness app market was flooded with new competitors. The business problem was clear: how does Hot 8 Yoga differentiate itself to capture new sign-ups and retain existing members?
"The booking page is the most important page in the app — but it wasn't designed like it was."
I benchmarked Hot 8 against Orange Theory — best-in-class fitness app design — and conducted a heuristic evaluation against Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics. I also ran moderated in-person user testing with participants who matched the studio's target demographic.
Three pain points emerged consistently across every participant:
Mapping Misty's end-to-end experience revealed exactly where the app was losing her — and where the biggest design opportunities were.
| Awareness | Consideration | Purchase | Use | Loyalty | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| About | Heard or saw something about the studio — curious, not yet committed. | Googles the studio, checks reviews on Yelp and Google to validate. | Finds the "$8 first week" deal. Downloads the app to make booking easier. | Logs in, tries to book classes. Can't find all studio locations. Has to Google info the app should provide. | Shares the $8 deal with friends. Purchases full monthly membership. |
| Feeling | "Hmm. Wonder what that yoga studio is like." | "Looks like a cool studio! I want to check it out." | "I like that there's a $8 trial week! Oh and an app too! NICE!" | "Wish certain things were more clear on the app." | "Could be better, but still a good experience!" |
| Sentiment | 🤔 | 🙂 | 😄 | 😮 | 😊 |
| Opportunities | Ensure studio info and photos are on all review platforms. Encourage existing yogis to write reviews. | Same — ensure consistent brand presence on social media and review sites. | Add QR code option. Simplify $8 sign-up flow. Make class offerings easy to scan. | Show all studio locations in-app. Surface key info without forcing users to Google. Add Apple Pay / Google Pay. | Offer referral promotions and discounts. Social media engagement features. Free trial extension. |
Based on the research, I built three personas. Misty is the primary — every major design decision was made for her.
Misty works from home, monitors her health obsessively, and expects apps to do the organizing work for her. She wants to book quickly without hunting, and will leave the moment it feels like effort.
Supporting personas — Jamal (37, management consultant) and Andrea (30, graduate student) — validated that the core booking frustrations weren't unique to Misty:
The vision: create an informative, accessible, and engaging app — one that lets users book classes, join challenges, view statistics, and connect with the brand. I moved through: Creative Brief → Competitive Audit → UX Strategy → Sitemap → Paper Sketches → Lo-fi → Mid-fi → Hi-fi → UX Annotations → User Testing.
The key design decision was the booking landing page: horizontal day-scroll calendar at top, filterable class list below with instructor photo on each row, and a per-class Book button. I documented every decision in a 16-callout UX annotation document.
The hi-fi prototype transformed a bare-bones template into a full-brand experience: real yoga photography, personalized home screen, gamified challenges, and a booking flow built around how Misty actually thinks.
The annotated booking screen documents all 16 design decisions:
The redesigned experience was tested with real users in moderated in-person sessions. Participants completed key tasks — finding a class, filtering by location, and completing a booking — with significantly less hesitation than in the original flow.
Deliverables: creative brief, competitive audit, UX strategy, sitemap, paper sketches, digitized wireframes (Adobe XD), 16-element UX annotation document, user testing script, and moderated test sessions.
The annotation work was strong, but I focused almost entirely on the booking landing page. In a real engagement, I'd expand scope to include the class detail page, the checkout flow, and the onboarding experience — all of which connect directly to the booking page and affect whether the redesign actually reduces drop-off. A redesigned landing page with a broken checkout flow solves half the problem.