Salonhome

Salonhome is the must-have mobile app designed to seamlessly connect beauty professionals with clients seeking top-notch beauty services. Whether you're a skilled stylist, makeup artist, nail technician, or spa specialist, or simply someone looking to enhance your beauty routine, Salonhome is your go-to destination for all things beauty.

CONTEXT

As the Head of Design for Salonhome, I led the design process from concept to implementation, focusing on creating a user-friendly interface that caters to the needs of both clients and beauty professionals also managing and leading the team across multiple platforms. The beauty service industry often lacks a centralized platform for clients to discover and book appointments with trusted beauty professionals. Likewise, beauty professionals struggle to efficiently manage their schedules and attract new clients. Despite having key players like Styleseat, Booksy, Treatwell etc. a lot of problem still remain unsolved in this space. Our goal was to address these pain points by designing a comprehensive mobile app that serves as a one-stop solution for both clients and beauty professionals.

RESEARCH & DISCOVERY

There were lots of preliminary activities that made up my operations as a design lead which includes drafting out a unique design workflow for the design team, understanding project goals and objectives, Identifying key user flows and use cases and so to gain insights into the needs and preferences of our target audience, we conducted extensive research through user interviews, surveys, and competitive analysis. We identified key pain points, such as difficulty finding reliable beauty services, scheduling conflicts, and lack of visibility for beauty professionals.

With each deep dive, we focused on key learnings & points of differentiation that were relevant to us. Understanding what gives each product its market fit and which demographic they are aiming at gave us a rounded perspective of this space. When each of the deep dives had been completed, we consolidated everything into a single Miro board to give a large overview.

We then ran a workshop to pull out the key insights across the team to take forward. These were incredibly valuable and I ensured that the team constantly referred to them in the ideation phase.

We then began to narrow down all this research into different themes from which we could form a value proposition. We used a rough "Jobs To Be Done" framework, to focus on user needs and motivations and created a series of value proposition verticals that we could validate. Alongside this we conducted an extensive piece of user research, interviewing lots of  people including beauty professionals to get qualitative insights around how they seek to grow their beauty business and how they use beauty services. From these, we pulled out key insights which we put through an affinity mapping session to organise these insights into themes.

The final stage of this was a large cross-team workshop involving product, design, marketing and engineering. There we reviewed all the inputs, themes and routes so far, and synthesised these into a final set of value propositions for us to validate.  This was done via a large survey sent out to different audience segments who rated which route excites them the most. Nailing this and being clear on what our differentiator will be vital to the ongoing success of Napster. From the insights gotten, i was able ropresent to the team possibl directions we should consider and important factors to take note of in order to build a successful product.

DESIGN

Building a simple and usable product was a central pillar for our proposition. After developing the information architecture, we started to plan how we could approach design execution — starting small and learning, before doing something fully featured. At this stage we had lots of back and forth, a lot of ideation, iteration and brainsorming session with the entire design team.

TESTING AND SPRINTS

I will not fail to mention that We had series of design sprints in the team which was an effective way to rapidly explore ideas, validate assumptions, and generate actionable insights within the short timeframe that we had. I used Slack to monitor our progress and assign sessions across the team. and this encouraged collaboration, creativity, and experimentation, helping the teams to innovate and solve problems more effectively.

Also we subjected every single user flow of the project to Testing the goal was to gain valuable insights into user behavior, preferences, and pain points. We synthesized our Test findings into actionable insights and recommendations for design improvements. We Used Maze for our user testing.

WEBSITE

To establish Salonhome's online presence, showcase their work, communicate with clients, and attract new businesses. we created a website taht serves as a valuable tool for brand building, marketing, and client engagement in the competitive beauty industry. There are so many data and research-based concepts that influenced the design decision for the salonhome website which is not commuicated in this paper for privacy sake. The Website is currently live and available on www.salonhome.com
We did a comprehensive analysis of our user structure before deploying for production to the front-end team, handing off deliverables for proper execution.

The salonhome project has two sides:
a.) The Client Side : Users who are insearch for beauty services and professionals.

b.) The Pro Side : These are users who own beauty business and workspaces to rent willing to scale up their business and meeting customers.

The Website stands as a centrepoint where both category of users are engaged and based on individual needs, the website contents are tailored and crafted to meet the needs of each category of user.

LIVE

Salonhome demonstrates the power of UX design in creating a user-centered platform that bridges beauty professionals and clients. By understanding user needs, iterating on design solutions, and prioritizing usability, I have successfully led the team towards launching a trusted and indispensable tool for the beauty industry, revolutionizing the way professionals and clients connect and collaborate.

CONCLUSION

Working on this project felt like a huge opportunity to make positive impact in the beauty space and I am super proud of my amazing team members who worked side by side with me daily to ensure this project was a success.