Case Study: salon booking app
My PROCESS
Double diamond & Technical constraints
THE CHALLENGE
Many people experience hesitation and uncertainty when booking services online. The client is looking for a more transparent way of offering services to customers by investigating the behavior and purchasing patterns of customers looking to book an appointment at their local beauty salon.
RESEARCH & PLANNING
Firstly we started with a focus group to help understand the common pain points experienced by the users booking services online.
Some common themes we noticed early on: Many users don’t like being offered services they did not search for before seeing what they searched. Concern’s about not being able to see all the information about a salon and service made some users back off from making a booking. Adding extra cost at the end would make users abandon the checkout.
DESIGNING THE SOLUTION
Our user research uncovered clear pain points that we needed to address with our design. First, we would need to make it easy for users to information about the salon and the staff. Letting the user see what others have said about a salon can help reassure the user about booking an appointment. Adding reviews to the salon page will reinforce what users are saying about that salon and help users make their minds up.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
USER FLOWS
BUSINESS GOALS
Creating user flows. We also created flows for booking appointments, checking salon information, and Checking salon reviews for usability testing.
Since our users wanted a way to see more information about the salon and the staff, we made it easy for the user by adding a salon page with that information, and the user can book any member of staff that offers the service they are looking for within the salon, that will help reassure the user and encourage them to book with that salon.
EARLY SKETCHES
While sketching key screens for creating user flows, I drew inspiration from similar companion and travel sites that most directly addressed user wants and needs uncovered in our user research.
PROTOTYPES
I created lo-fidelity prototypes to perform usability testing of each user flow and validate our designs. The set of user tasks was comprehensive in addition to booking appointments, checking salon information, and Checking salon reviews.
CONCLUSION
We could only qualitatively assess how well our design accomplished the goals defined in the project brief. We performed usability testing and conducted follow-up interviews to evaluate the effectiveness of our design and found that the updates exceeded expectations, particularly about having more information about the salon and how easy it is to see what other users have said about that salon.
Overall, the features we designed were described as helpful, and effective in helping users book appointments online. I can confidently say we accomplished our goals.