Gabriella’s Hair Studio
Role: Research, Prototyping, Interactions, Visuals
Duration: April-May 2019
Challenge
Gabriella started her business about a year ago and has a strong customer base. Her clients and perspective clients find and interact with her through social media. With social media being post based and feed oriented, Gabriella found herself answering the same questions repeatedly and heard from her clients that it was difficult staying up to date with closings, services, promos, etc.
We set out to create a website that would save Gabriella time answering repeat questions, support her current clients, and entice perspective clients.
Impact
Online traffic (aggregate of social media, review sites, etc) increased 57% and booking rate increased by 32%. Additionally, current client satisfaction was reported (anecdotally) to have increased.
Gabriella received a website, branding assets, and an optimized Google Business profile.
Discovery
For this project I took a goal-oriented design approach. Research methods included user interviews, stakeholder interviews, user personas, and a competitive analysis of local competitors. To get the ball rolling, I started by asking myself some questions:
“What are the unmet needs of a person looking for a hair stylist?”
“Who are our primary users, current or future clients?”
“Which users are most important to the business?”
User Interviews
The scope of the user interviews included what users looked for when searching for and selecting a new hair stylist. The interview began with a short survey and then leveraged that data while conducting the subsequent interview. The study was conducted among a sample group of current clients and non-clients ranging in age from 18 - 60. The interviews showed me the follow:
84% said the contact, location, and business hours were what they regularly looked up for a business and if they weren’t easily found they wouldn’t book an appointment
96% said the overall aesthetic of the website for their stylist needed to make them feel how they wanted to look and feel during/after their service
73% wanted to easily review the service options and their prices without needing to call the salon
68% felt that seeing a stylists previous work was important to them because it showed them the quality of work and the stylists pride in their work
User Personas
After conducting the user interviews I had a better understanding for what current and future clients cared about when choosing a stylist or salon. From there I was able to create two personas based on the goals and characteristics
Competitive Analysis
In conjunction with the user interviews results I ventured out to see what Gabriella’s competitors websites were already doing and what user goals they were not reaching. I evaluated several features highlighted from the user interviews.
I found that there was a dichotomy between the competitor websites. The sites were either modern, created or updated within recent years or quite dated and difficult to read and navigate. The modern websites had many of the important features discussed but surprisingly did not have easy to find hours or email sign up.
Branding + Mood Board
To better understand Gabriella’s Hair Studio brand identity we went through a couple exercises. First we wrote down anything that came to mind about what Gabriella thought her brand was like. Next, we discussed what Gabriella’s vision was for her clients and what she wanted them to feel like when they were in her chair and as they left their appointment.
From there I distilled down the key words and built a mood board to inform the UI aesthetic.
Stakeholder Review
After the initial kickoff discussion with Gabriella where we discussed her business needs, this interview included a discussion reviewing the findings from the initial research and branding needs.
We reviewed the features from the user interviews and we found that adding an appointment scheduler would be out of the scope for this project due to the level of customization required and it not being a desired workflow change for Gabriella at the time.
Design
From my user research, I learned that the homepage was the most important page so I kicked off the design by iterating over different homepage options.
The focus with the layout was to include the highlighted information from the research (contact, location, hours) within view when initially opening the site and having them accessible as the user navigated throughout the website.
We did some informal user testing to get a better sense of which homepage layout would be more performant. That data along with the business goals guided the decision for the final layout.
Wireframes
We did subsequent rounds of user testing on a small subset of clients which informed the site and footer layouts.
Below are the finalized wireframes for the homepage, services, gallery, about and contact pages.
Final Design
Once the wireframes were approved I worked on building out a high fidelity mockup before implementing the design.
Visit the live site: gabriellashairstudio.com
Note: this document represents what was delivered to the client as of 2019
Takeaways
Outcome:
Within the first month Gabriella’s social engagement and email sign ups steadily increased and she received positive feedback from her current client base — around 4 months after launch we calculated an increase of social engagement by 57% and booking rate by 32%. Anecdotally, Gabriella’s clients expressed satisfaction with the new website. They mentioned feeling more comfortable and confident in learning about salon updates and choosing services (less time checking social media and messaging Gabriella asking about prices).
What I learned:
This project was a great exercise in conducting user research and reinforcing the need to remove myself from the design, while this is a common experience that I have and will experience in the future, I was not the sole target demographic.
It was a fun challenge balancing Gabriella’s wants and needs with the users’ needs, working within these constraints ultimately made the project more focused. An area that this project would have benefited from was more user testing before launching the website, due to time constraints and budget the user testing was mostly conducted by the stakeholder, Gabriella and close clients.
Next Steps:
Actions for the future would include additional features like an online appointment scheduler. Additional usability testing with or without the additional feature would be beneficial for the business too. The response from users after the launch validated a number of design decisions and informed minor tweaks in the following weeks. I believe that a more thorough usability test would yield even greater improvements for the consumer and business.