Likeable — Case study
Changing the way people are looking for professionals.
Introduction.
Changing the way people are looking for professionals. No fancy booking systems, no fake reviews, just you and them.
Connecting beauty creatives (for start) like tattoo, hair and make-up with potential clients and recruiters or just between them.
Creatives get local exposure, clients get one-to-one personalized advices and recruiters find talent to hire. It’s not only about inspiration and finding the right professional.
Discovery.
The vision
It seems that we are in a relationship centric era when we talk about products, so we expect a more personal type of relationship.
The cycle:
The problems.
- The current platforms are complex, not really built focusing on a relationship between the customer and the professional or between professionals.
- Most platforms act like a online catalog, you look through a lot of listings and choose something probably based on reviews which can be done by almost anyone, so there is no real credibility.
- If you are a business (and not just a business), how can you easily find talent nearby? You have to manually browse by scrolling and clicking a lot through dozens of professionals.
- There is no platform where you can find inspiration, or a networking possibility between professionals, a place where salons can find talent to hire, a place where you can book a professional at your home, or where potential clients can receive one-on-one personalized advice.
- All the platforms are focused on professionals finding potential clients, which is somehow curios because our research showed that most of the clients are not looking for new professionals because they already have someone where they regularly go, because once you find a good hair stylist you stick with him.
The solution.
- A native app(iOS/Android) that helps connecting beauty creatives between them (tattoo, hair, makeup…) or clients and recruiters. This can grow exponentially by adding other industries like dentists, carpenters and many more industries that are in context with this product.
- Creatives get local exposure, clients get one-to-one personalized advices and recruiters find talent to hire. It’s not only about inspiration and finding the right professional.
- The possibility to book a professional at your home.
- To not forget, all of these features in a very easy and fun way to use product. The interface and functionality it’s already tested on a massive number of users and it’s already working, of course, in a slightly diferent context.
Competitive advantages.
Ease of use
Easily find and engage with professionals/ clients around you. Fun to use.
Different review system
Instead of the classic review system which often doesn’t work, we thought about “what better review than a friend recommendation?”
Flexibility
It is suitable for dentists, carpenters, esteticians, lawyers and a lot more…
All in one
All the competitive products features are implemented here but in a relationship centric way.
Lowest fee
1.99$ monthly subscription for professionals.
Personalized advices
Get real. One on one personalized advices from professionals.
Many use cases
It can be used also as a collaboration tool between professionals or as a talent search for salons.
Research.
Target audience.
Once I know what audiences I want to reach I spend some time learning more about them like what publications they like to read, what they are interested in, where they share their interests and more personal things based on observation.
We start with three types of audiences:
- Tattoo professionals
- Hair professionals
- Clients
Some insights based on observation.
- People do not know what they want but they like to hear what they want.
- Professionals are interested into showing their latest works with pride.
- One of the people frustrations is how they can trust a professional.
- The majority of people who give feedback are the potential clients, not the artists.
- People are not so interested in how much does a tattoo cost.
- People want to have the possibility to have a conversation with the professionals before they do anything else.
- People are interested in looking for hair styles but for inspiration not for finding a good professional.
The user journey and wireframing process.
First of all, I would like to present how I failed and learned from the failure.
Everything looked so simple that I decided to start as soon as possible. The main goal was to put something out there in order to receive some feedback.
So, I released some high-fidelity prototypes to test.
Everything looked cool and simple and that made me enthusiastic about it. It made me so until real people started to test it. Then it was the opposite feeling.I was thinking that this good and people will react very good.
What was going wrong?
One of the fundamental mistakes was that the focus was on building a “catalog like” list of professionals where clients can choose from various filters like price, distance, location and so on.
Almost everyone that tested the prototype said that it looks cool and everything but they are not really interested in booking a beauty professional because “I go the the same hair salon / hair dresser for 3 years and she is doing a great job. Why should I be interested in finding another one?”. And the same applies for tattoos, make-up and other beauty related services.
Of course, there were other mistakes also but I’m not going into further details.
The next version
The “professional” user flow:
The “client” user flow:
Designing the user interface.
The approach I have taken it’s based on a pretty common pattern. There is nothing in terms of the user interface that is new and it needs extensive tests to prove it’s functionality. Sometimes it’s good to use existing designs systems / patterns that works instead of trying to reinvent the wheel just for the sake of being cool.
Let’s have a look at the UI:
Development.
The entire team consists of me, myself and I. So, we do not really have the resources, time and money to go native. Instead of building a iOS or Android app and spend lots of $$$$ doing these, I decided to build a web app which does exactly the same thing and it’s allowing me to have something live and ready to test. Let’s say I will have an MVP.
If the product will get some good feedback, then I will move further.
Launching the product.
Who will help us achieve our goals and why?
Hair and tattoo professionals and potential clients. I will not got into more details about them because we already spoke about them in the research section.
What key messages will resonate with our audience?
The professionals will definitely need to know that they will be in the right place where they can get potential customers or offers advices to gain trust/popularity. The people have to know that they will receive advices at the moment they need them and immediately know if any of their friends are connected with that specific professional.
The landing page:
Visit website: getlikeable.co
Private beta release coming in the next few weeks. YAYY!
Thank you for reading.
You can follow me on Twitter: @agispas
