An app to support yoga teachers to
implement a yoga-based approach
to promote wellbeing among young
people: usability study
Alicia García-Holgado
GRIAL Research Group, Computer Science Department
Research Institute for Educational Sciences
University of Salamanca, Spain
aliciagh@usal.es
Iñaki Tajes Reiris, Francisco J. García-Peñalvo
GRIAL Research Group, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain
Nick Kearney, Charlotta Martinus
Teen Yoga Foundation, Camerton, UK

Index
1. HIPPOCAMPUS project
2. Yuva Yoga app
3. Methodology
4. Heuristic evaluation
5. Conclusions
6. Acknowledgements
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HIPPOCAMPUS Project (I)
Mental health is a key issue facing
adolescents across Europe
One in five children and adolescents in
the EU suffers from developmental,
emotional or behavioural problems
(CAMHEE report, 2009)
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Those not yet exhibiting clear mental health issues related to chronic
stress or anxiety not appear in the statistics

HIPPOCAMPUS Project (II)
Chronic stress and other issues affects
their intrinsic motivation to engage in
any activity
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It especially important to provide
children and young people with
approaches to self-management of
stress

HIPPOCAMPUS Project (III)
Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing among Young People through Yoga
Call: European Union. Erasmus + KA2 – Cooperation and Innovation for Good
Practices. Strategic Partnerships for Youth
Reference: 2017-2-ES02-KA205-009942 Budget: 192.914€
Dates: 01/10/2017 - 30/11/2019 Coordinator: GRIAL Research Group
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https://hippocampusproject.eu

HIPPOCAMPUS Project (IV)
It aims to address these issues by
promoting the well-being of young
people through the practice of a range
of techniques derived from yoga
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Yoga is not always accesible to all
young people due to a variety of
financial and other reasons

HIPPOCAMPUS Project (V)
O1. A programme to introduce yoga-based
practices in youth contexts such as formal
education contexts or associations
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O2. A mobile app both for iOS and
Android in order to give yoga teachers
in formal education contexts

Yuva Yoga app (I)
• https://yuvayoga.org
• The app is part of the pilot experiences carry out in different
schools involved in the project
• It is a tool for supporting the programme and providing
opportunities for participants to continue their practice at home, in
addition to the sessions contained in the programme
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Alfa: March
2018
Beta: July
2018
1.0:
December
2018
1.2: June
2019

Yuva Yoga app (II)
• A native development approach
was selected, to ensure a certain
quality and the proper
functioning of the app
• Based on Backend as a service
(BaaS)
• To support all offline content
related to yoga practices, it was
necessary to use local offline
databases in client applications
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Yuva Yoga app (III)
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Yuva Yoga app (IV)
• There are more than 100
activities and 15 sessions
included in the app
• The main elements of the
app are yoga activities that
are postures (asana),
meditations, reflections and
breath (pranayama)
• Available in English, French,
Italian, Norwegian, Spanish
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Yuva Yoga app (V)
• The classroom supports the
communication of teachers,
educators or yoga
instructors with young
people.
• A virtual space for each
group of students that they
work with and send them
different kind of sessions
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Methodology (I)
• The heuristic evaluation is a usability
engineering method for finding the
usability problems in a user interface
design
• Two phases, one focused on iOS client
and other on Android client
• This study is focused on iOS evaluation
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Methodology (II)
Participants
• The heuristic evaluation was carried out by four experts, one
woman and three men between 32 to 55 years old
• None of the experts had used the app previously due it was
available publicly less than one month before carried out the
evaluation
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E1: Web
developer &
Researcher
focused on
technological
ecosystems (10
years)
E2: Java
developer
expert & HCI
teacher (30
years)
E3: Professor
and developer
of graphical
user interfaces
(20 years)
E4: Professor &
researcher
focused on
data
visualization
(20 years)

Methodology (III)
Instrumentation
The same template was provided to the experts in order to get the reports to perform
the heuristic evaluation
1 indicates that the expert detected a huge amount of serious problems and 10 no
problems (or low number of non-serious problems) were found
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Heuristic rules (Nielsen, 1994) Points (0-10) Comments
Visibility of system status
Match between system and the real world
User control and freedom
Consistency and standards
Error prevention
Recognition rather than recall
Flexibility and efficiency of use
Aesthetic and minimalist design
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Help and documentation

Methodology (IV)
Study design and data collection
• According to Nielsen the
evaluators decide on their own
how they want to proceed with
evaluating the interface, but in
this process, the researchers
provided a set of guidelines and a
report template
• The responsibility to organize how
to fix the problems fell in the
developer associated with the
project
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Heuristic evaluation (I)
Experts detected problems associated with all heuristic rules
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Heuristic rule E1 E2 E3 E4
HR1: Visibility of system status 9 10 6 8
HR2: Match between system and the real world 10 10 9 8
HR3: User control and freedom 10 10 8 8
HR4: Consistency and standards 3 10 8 7
HR5: Error prevention 7 10 10 7
HR6: Recognition rather than recall 9 8 10 7
HR7: Flexibility and efficiency of use 10 10 10 7
HR8: Aesthetic and minimalist design 9 10 10 10
HR9: Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors 10 10 10 6
HR10: Help and documentation 5 10 10 5

Heuristic evaluation (II)
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Heuristic evaluation (III)
HR4 Consistency and standards
• 16 usability problems were detected,
most of them are inconsistences
related to yoga terms and words used
to talk about the contents
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• E1: “The classroom screens have different design than other parts
of the app “
• E3: “An issue related to the good practices of iOS interaction, the
configuration icon should be always available”

Heuristic evaluation (IV)
HR10 Help and documentation
• Few usability problems, but most of
them are serious
• There are no help documentation
available in the app or in an external
website
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• The yoga terms in the app are not explained (program, session…)
• No information about where are the settings

Heuristic evaluation (V)
HR1 Visibility of system status
• Several usability problems with different
severity rating according to the time
needed to solve them
• E4: “the user does not have a notion of the
elements of a session. When the cards are
piled, there is no way for the user to
understand how many parts of the session
have been completed and how many are
remaining”
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Heuristic evaluation (V)
HR1 Visibility of system status
• E3: “It is not possible to
control the videos player
inside each activity”
• E1: “The visualization of
activity stats in the profile is
useful but if you want to
know exactly which is the
percentage of activities that
you practice is not possible”
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Heuristic evaluation (VI)
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E1: Web
developer &
Researcher
focused on
technological
ecosystems (10
years)
E2: Java
developer
expert & HCI
teacher (30
years)
E3: Professor
and developer
of graphical
user interfaces
(20 years)
E4: Professor &
researcher
focused on
data
visualization
(20 years)

Conclusions
• The app is designed to be used to guide
personal yoga practice with appropriate
sessions and activities
• Yoga teachers can also use the app to
help their students maintain their
practice between sessions
• Several authors affirm that the
perception of evaluators in using heuristic
evaluation method is not consistent with
the users' experience with a system
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Conclusions
• The low number of problems have been taken into account to
develop a new minor version of the Yuva Yoga app (1.2)
• It is important to highlight that the heuristic evaluation for iOS has
influenced in the Android client, because the functionality is pretty
similar, although interfaces in iOS and Android have differences
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• It is also required to apply an empirical
method to get information about the use of
the app by the final users (teachers, yoga
instructors, educators and young people)

Acknowledgments
With the support of the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union in its Key Action 2
“Cooperation and Innovation for Good Practices. Strategic Partnerships for Youth”.
Project HIPPOCAMPUS (Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing among Young People
through Yoga) (Reference number 2017-2-ES02-KA205-009942). The content of this
publication does not reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Responsibility for
the information and views expressed in the publication lies entirely with the authors
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An app to support yoga teachers to
implement a yoga-based approach
to promote wellbeing among young
people: usability study
Alicia García-Holgado
GRIAL Research Group, Computer Science Department
Research Institute for Educational Sciences
University of Salamanca, Spain
aliciagh@usal.es
Iñaki Tajes Reiris, Francisco J. García-Peñalvo
GRIAL Research Group, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain
Nick Kearney, Charlotta Martinus
Teen Yoga Foundation, Camerton, UK