Case study. Designing a management console for the Wellness booking platform [2013]

A story about UX design process for a startup that speaks about lessons I’ve been learning through the project development. It is a part of my portfolio showcase that aims to unveil approaches in my work.

How did it all start?

In 2013 being inspired by the “viral booking app trend”, we with my friend developer decided to incorporate something useful on the tiny Baltic market. We've brainstormed through a bunch of industries in an attempt to find a potential niche and figured out that there was clearly an outdated process gap in the Wellness area in the Baltics.

We've learned it thanks to some talks and surveys which basically gave us an understanding that 78% of people do spend some of their time ranging through the internet to find well-being services. The most demanded search queries were Spa, Fitness, and Hairdressing salons.

From that moment on, we rushed furiously into the mobile app development that would give users an opportunity to find the best fit for their wellness needs. We did numerous surveys, interviews, case studies, market research. Eventually, we’ve created an app that would find a service provider for the user based on his Location, Pricing, and Review requirements with some last-minute offers as a bonus.

The problem was that we’ve been passionately focusing on the end-user app, forgetting about the actual business and market entry strategy.

So, one day we were pitching our app to the business coach, and suddenly he asked us:

- Did you. guys, actually interviewed any Service providers(businesses)?

The truth is: We haven't. And then it struck us. He was right: No services - no App adoption. Literally, right after that question, we've left the event to knock on the doors of the nearest hairdressing salons down the street.
In the freestyle form, we've talked to only 2 hairdressers in different places, and immediately realized how many insights we’re still missing.

The fun was about to begin.

Mission

Our primary goal was to develop reservations and client management systems, that could beat existing booking habits. In 2013 pen & paper reservation process was still a very strong pattern…
Just offering new marketing channels wasn't enough.
If we wanted to have services on our side, we had to offer an easy entry and friction-free UX in this CRM platform.

Planning

First of all, we’ve outlined the methods and steps that needed to be taken in order to create a user management console. The list of methods and process models is pretty stardust:

➡️ Discovery: Secondary & Primary research

User groups / Surveys / Market research
30 1-in-1 interviews / Interested clients list for future concepts testing up / Persona’s / Scenarios / Customer journey

➡️Define: Design Brief

Intentions + Problems + Market gap = Information Architecture (IA)

➡️Develop: Conceptualizing

Low fidelity Mock-up / Prototype / User testing.

➡️ Delivery: Implementation

Usability Testing during product backend development.

The timeline was not fixed as we did it on our own encouragement in the free time gaps. The whole process took about 3 months.

Discovery

We were two foreigners in Estonia. The first thing we started with: equipped ourselves with another local person in the team. Once we all sit together, we prepared a questionnaire and spend a whole week for interviews. We literally were walking down the street entering each new salon on the way and asked if the manager has a little bit of time to talk with us. Later we started to work harder on the databases and created a list of salons we target, collected their contacts, prepared inviting intro mails, then arranged calls and appoint meetings. Eventually, it took us a whole month of interviews with a couple of meetings per day. Mostly we were focusing on the hairdressing salons issues.

Let’s get straight to the points we derived from the industry learning. Like in each online service one thing needs to be developed perfect:

A system that can automatically receive user’s bookings.

Though this value is understood as a “Basic expectation” according to the Kano model. We figured out that not only the console has to be developed, but there is a tone of nuances to be considered if we want to beat the phone-mailing-paper booking system:

1. Time slot gaps equal division
2. Last-minute cancellations and no show-ups
3. The length/color of hair/health problems / medical prescriptions etc.
4. Keep up the motivation level of workers.
5. Convenient and instant messaging system, that keeps both users and service providers use the app over the phone calls.
6. Safe encryption and data protection

Here are some insights we’ve come across during the process:

The data we’ve learned, helped us to understand a target user group and by compiling common behavioral needs & patterns to create a Persona profile.

Market research:

Now, next on the way was Market research. To analyze the pros and cons of each market solution the method of “Heuristics” was really handy. We were testing existing solutions according to the next rules:

What this research gave us?

1.An understanding that there is one big fish on the stage called “Treatwell” (at that time it was Wahanda). It operates in Western European market, conquering new countries fast enough and it has at least 5 years of experience. Hence we calmly agreed to change a course from developing a monopoly into a product that could be sold to the Big gamer. The good news is that one of the “Treatwell” investors is Estonian. We’ve managed to arrange a couple of meetings with him and really understood a business ground with working design principles.

2. SalonInfra — another gamer on the local Estonian market, but sits on the other bank of the river. It’s a B2B service, that offers users to book appointments from the site of wellness providers. Our benefit was a mobile application in the hands of a bunch of interested potential users. We could offer a centralized hub for both: users and businesses.

3. Other solutions were really not user-friendly on the markets we’re targeting. Now, we’ve finally learned a good example of design patterns that work and felt a green light on the market.
What was still missing: Some action and actual prototype.

Information architecture and mock-ups

The first thing that was important to do is to brainstorm and define a site structure. For this, I used XMind mapping software and slowly defined MVP and Beta feature versions

Right after came a time for sketching different compositions according to each section defined in IA.

And finally, mock-ups were tested on the potential customers.

To test black and white prototypes, I wrote 3 tasks to complete and gave them to the Salon’s manager. The idea was to see if there are some difficulties they may stuck with.

As soon as problematic areas, misunderstandings or omissions were defined and fixed, naturally, I started to work on the User Interface interaction elements. Most of them were flexible and modular, which would provide fluidity and responsiveness to the service across different screen sizes.

Elements were applied to the mock-up structure and hence user interface collected all the puzzles together in order to be functional and visually clear.

🎬 There were different issues detected that we've intended to fix in the next iteration, but unfortunately we the team split up and since this was our free-time project along with full-time commitments, I was unable to find time to bring in the seed investments to hire a developer to pair up with.

So, not a long time after the project was unfortunately shut down.

Thank you for reading and testing it through.