Unite platform with seamless web and app experiences.
✻ Full-time · Aug.2020 - Jan.2021
✻ Product Design (UX/UI)
While launching the Live Events feature can connect teachers and practitioners in real-time, we noticed that people often use Live Events to discuss follow-up communication outside the app.
It’s a problem because it’s time-consuming and lacks a continuous Insight Timer experience. Communicating and interacting outside the app also decreases retention, engagement, and app usage.
We need to fix this problem, and we need to do it fast—we caulk while the ship is sailing.
First, Insight Circle is the group chat feature where people can create or join the Circle. People can chat, recommend content, or practice group meditation.
The good thing was people had already formed a weak-tie community. They were willing to connect after the live session.Investment-wise, we already invent a chat feature for the Live Events. Now is an excellent time to build Insight Circle to leverage our existing technology stack.
I synthesise users’ needs (Quantitative) and interview stakeholders (Qualitative) to identify how the users’ needs can blend with the business goals.
We devised the hypothesis: “The communication channels within our ecosystem will intuitively form a stong-tie community between teachers and practitioners, increasing engagement metrics.”
Business-wise, we need these features to go live ASAP. The more we delay, the greater our leak—people form their community elsewhere as we speak.
A strong community build from a strong team. I spent the first few weeks bonding a rapport with my new developer crew (which became friends until nowadays).
I explore their current technology stack, what their sprint looks like, how they prefered to work with the designer, and even what are their hobby.
I spot on an opportunity—the current code-based lack of the design foundation. It means our dev must assume what design to use for every component they build.
At the time, we used Tailwind CSS with React for the web. Without solid design guidelines, the myriad CSS variations slowed us down instead of fly things up.
It affects the design consistency and our development turnaround. Remember, we need to ship this project fast.
I create a new design foundation for the web team, and I name its token based on their codebase. It means my Figma naming convention will equal their CSS property.
Now we’re in sync and are in the business—let’s design the Insight Circle:
“
Kocha join us at a critical point of a crucial project. His understanding of technical implementation also helped us complete the project on a tight deadline, without compromising on aesthetics”
— Yoong Leong, Tech Lead at Insight at Insight Timer
We work closely with the teachers to ensure that Circle creation is intuitive and straightforward. Only a circle name is required to start; more details can fill later on.
We can create a public and private Circle with a few clicks. I will discuss Enterprise Circle (the product we try to monetise) later.
Discoverability is the heart of the project. People can search and join a public Circle or request to join a Private and Enterprise Circle from the web and app.
We rely on organic growth at first; word of mouth and staff picks are the main entry point to discover Circles.
We can use machine learning to recommend relevant Circles later once our data model learns more from the V1 and grows our user-based.
“
Kocha approaches every feature with a fresh UX perspective and an unbiased lens”
— Andrew McKay, Head of Design at Insight Timer
Now teachers and practitioners can stay in touch comfortable on one platform—no more outside noisy social media to follow on the subsequent practice.
We facilitate a tool to chat, recommend content, practice a group meditation, or broadcast their Live Event in their Circle—an all-in-one platform.
Insight Circle is a unified communication channel with a seamless experience through our web and app.It’s home to 18 million meditators worldwide, boosting our user engagement and bottom-line membership revenue (the MemberPlus).
“
Kocha’s designs are purposeful, practical and very user friendly. It is user friendly not only to the end users, but also the developer building it out”
— John Kueh, Software Engineering Manager at Insight Timer
Now, let’s spice thing up. We want to monetise Enterprise Circle through a subscription business model—I’m afraid I have to disagree and commit to this.
Although Enterprise Circle sounded like a good idea from a technology standpoint, we only built one product for a multi-purpose use case.
But allowing companies to possess their Circle creates numerous complex consequences such as reputation and security, domain authority, design and development, etc.
I think the time of engagement metric could indicate whether people use Insight Circle during working hours or not before we commit to building the Enterprise Circle.
Instead of Enterprise Circle, I think we better use those resources to create features such as paid promotion, boost posts, or original content.
Please note that I don’t have the revenue data at the time of writing, and my assumption could be wrong.
We design with the customer journey in mind and aim to deliver the seamless Insight Timer experience.
I design a companion app for the web, and now we need to work with the app team to create space in the app and start thinking about the go-to-market plan.
After all, people may chat on mobile while watching their teacher speaking on their full-screen laptop or 8K Ultra HD TV from their cost living room.
The number 1 free meditation app. Guided meditations and talks led by the world’s top meditation and mindfulness experts, and teachers from Stanford, Harvard, the University of Oxford and more.
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I acknowledge the traditional owners of Australia, on whose land I live and work. I pay my respect to their people, designers, and storytellers—past, present and emerging.
