Nabostylisten 💅

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Project Type: Semester Assignment at Noroff - Group Project.

Timeframe: Winter 2023 - 4 weeks.

Main Roles: User research, wireframing and testing.

Background

Nabostylisten AS is an Oslo based company, founded in 2022. Their website allows for customers to contact stylists and have beauty services delivered to a desired location. Nabostylisten’s goal is to make beauty services more accessible and to make it easier for stylists to find clients.

The Challenge

Nabostylisten aimed to improve their mobile user experience and simplify their booking process. Our team followed the multiple stages of the Design Thinking Process from the Nielsen Norman Group, and our redesign was later presented to the owners and team of Nabostylisten, providing them with valuable insights and ideas.

Gathering Insights 🔍

Our team set out to identify the goals and needs of beauty stylists and costumers, and to understand why Nabostylisten experienced a high number of dropouts on their booking flow. To achieve this, we conducted interviews with beauty service enthusiasts and stylists, administrated a client survey and performed an early usability test on Nabostylisten’s current website. All data was analyzed through affinity mapping and atomic research.

Main Findings

There are too many beauty services and it’s hard for costumers to understand what they all are. Therefore, ensuring the website has clear labeling is crucial to make it more user-friendly;
Clarifying the booking process through intuitive design and clear guidelines is also essential for efficiency and user satisfaction.

User Personas 😊

Based on the data collected from our research, we created two user personas, to represent costumers and stylists. This allowed us to maintain a user-centered approach by empathizing with their goals and needs..

Meticulous Maya, teacher

Pain Point: Beauty service websites have too much information and confusing labeling.

Main Goal: Find a trustworthy online beauty service and a hairdresser that understands her needs.

Vibrant Victoria, hairstylist

Pain Point: It’s difficult to communicate and explain to clients the services she provides.

Main Goal: Have a quality booking system to keep track of appointments and build good relations with costumers.

Ideation Workshop 💡

At this stage of our design process, we facilitated two ideation workshops: one with the UX design class from Noroff and Nabostylisten, and another with our team and some classmates. The latter, organized by us, included a brain-walking activity using “How Might We” questions. All data was analyzed through affinity mapping.

Conclusions

Nabostylisten needs to simplify the booking process and improve content display and filtering;
Costumers should have the option to talk with stylists before booking any service, to make sure it meets their expectations.

Wireframing 🔧

Our group held multiple sketching sessions to design a general layout for Nabostylisten’s mobile website booking flow. Each team member created their own sketches, and we combined our favorite features. Below are some of our final wireframes.

Testing the Solution 🗒️

We developed a prototype based on our wireframes and conducted six usability tests, where participants were tasked with booking a beauty service of their choice.

Conclusions

Users enjoyed the color palette and the straightforward design, which contributed to a calming and positive experience;
The design needs additional visual cues to better guide users.;
It’s also necessary to increase icon sizing, remove unnecessary graphical elements and add confirmation messages.

Project Reflection 💭

Redesigning the mobile booking flow for Nabostylisten was challenging. We not only had to learn how to work effectively as a team but were also still mastering the design process and had limited technical knowledge of Figma.

Our redesign proposal had technical mistakes and design flaws, but it was a valuable learning experience. It allowed us to master design patterns and best practices that proved useful in later projects.