Project overview

This project aims to redesign the hair salon's website to create a modern, engaging, and highly functional digital presence. The new site will serve as a key tool for attracting new clients and strengthening relationships with existing ones by effectively showcasing the salon's offerings, its updated look, and its commitment to a top-tier customer experience.

“What challenges could we face moving forward?”

I had an opportunity to explore real world user feedback by directly engaging with my client’s customers onsite. I compiled all of my findings into affinity diagram and used dot to decide where to focus our efforts. The results confirmed a strong preference for online booking, not just among younger customers but also across other age groups. Additionally, I found that pricing transparency is also crucial for building trust.

Meet the users

Next I developed a user persona to better unstand our target audience. Creating these persona helps me focus on my design and feature set to meet the specific needs and perfernce of users like them.

Recognising that user behaviour often involves initially searching for salons on Google Maps and then evaluating the salon’s competence through image galleries on its website — prior to even considering pricing — I refined my primary user flow.

After careful evaluation, we transitioned into the ideation phase. We decided to proceed, despite having a well-defined understanding of the processes that needed to be implemented. My aim was to enhance the personal appeal of our stakeholder and her team and encourage user by showcasing a diverse range of salon imagery. Additionally, I thought of introducing a filterable style gallery that would enable users to browse through different hairstyles for different hair types.

Creating low-fidelity wireframes made rethink the necessity of certain elements and reorganise content for a better user experience. I understood that the before/after style gallery would need to live on a separate page, with a teaser on the main landing page. Because customers like to see before and after pictures, we decided to not limit ourselves to just a carousel on the landing page. It wouldn’t allow the implementation of multiple filters we needed for a pleasant user experience.

During a design critique, I received feedback that prompted me to seek guidance from a UX designer on LinkedIn. I was advised to narrow the project's scope to focus exclusively on the core user journey of booking a hairdresser's appointment, as developing additional user flows or personas was unnecessary. Taking this advice, our team refined the MVP happy path user flow.

I moved on to crafting my mid-fidelity wireframes. During this phase, I opted for a strategic change in our booking system solution. Rather than merely displaying a static price list on the landing page, we integrated a feature that allows users to select services directly from the price list, guiding them to subsequent booking screens to complete the process.

Final Cut

Diving into hi-fi design was a valuable learning experience. I initially underestimated the importance of small details, but I quickly realized that having many design options doesn't mean you need to use them all. This process reinforced the principle that sometimes, less is more.

When we conducted usability testing with five participants, their real-world feedback was crucial. Observing their interactions revealed a key oversight: we failed to include any markers indicating the service category a user was viewing. Despite this, the overall feedback was positive, and testers found our online booking system easy to use.

Lessons learned and next steps

• If the project were to extend, our priority would be to fully build out the hairstyle gallery. It’s a game-changer for bringing new customers on board and our client would benefit greatly from it.

• Engaging with users in their natural environment via field research unveils authentic feedback.

• Clear visual cues like highlighting the active booking section are crucial for user orientation.

This project was a transformative journey through the nuances of UX/UI design, punctuated by real-world challenges and invaluable learnings. We navigated complex questions of user trust, visual appeal, and practical functionality. We learned that the success of a digital presence is tied to the small details. As we navigated through the design process — from stakeholder interviews to wireframing, med-fi to Hi-Fi prototypes . I kept my client’s challenges and aspirations in sight, tailoring a holistic solution that also laid the groundwork for future growth. The end product was a user-friendly, transparent, and aesthetically pleasing online platform that upheld the salon’s unique vintage charm while modernizing its customer interface. Though our formal engagement with this project has concluded, the insights we’ve gathered will certainly shape our approaches in future endeavors.

I also looked into several potential competing companies and although none competed directly with Lala’s beauty and style. But they can still infringe on their business revenue and popularity.

the majority of the features between competitors were very similar, however the main difference that we notice were

• easy accessible vs hardly accessible

• too many screens vs simplified interaction

• bright/distracting interface vs minimalistic interface