Booked.

A website design for informal small businesses to gain visibility.

Student Project

Responsibilities

UXUI - Customer check out, Customer bookings dashboard, Logo, Style guide, Prototyping

Team

UXUI - Francesca Lalanne, Faith, Brianna, Hector

WebDev - Jacky, Hiwot, Kevin

Industry

On-Demand Service

Duration

3/2023 - 6/2023

Problem Statement

Informal service providers have very low visibility and reach when they don’t have a brick and mortar location that can be put online for search engines to index and show to searchers. Additionally, they usually don’t have good access to digital tools to empower their businesses.

User

Informal service providers , local people who need informal services provided

Goal

Our goal is to improve visibility and provide access to digital tools for informal service providers to enhance their reach and empower their business. We believe designing a virtual storefront for payment processing and an interaction platform for businesses and customers will increase the businesses revenue by 50%.

Constraints

Our challenge lies in the absence of budget allocation. We have a limited timeframe of two months to conduct initial design, research, and develop the product. The scope of our project permits featuring only one type of business on the website. Additional features will be incorporated in a future design iteration .

Process

Wireframe

Our process began with wireframes and user journeys immediately. Our design team had to align ourselves with the development team. So we needed to move fast within a 2 week sprint to create wireframes while our developers built the back end and setup the database.

The user story that I focused on was “as customer who is trying to book a service online, I want to be able to select the service that I want from the vendors profile, get an estimate, and schedule my service”

Initially, I designed a drop down selection menu of possible services by one type of business (automobile repair), giving the customer the chance to add their location zip code, select the date of service, and how long they would need the service for, and a check availability option.

This setup would give the customer a chance to engage in a messaging platform with the service provider. However after the first review meeting with our development team, the messaging option was not possible due to time constraints.

I also designed the service providers profile page, adding features like customer review, a photo carousel of completed works, and a share button to promote the providers visibility. This design has been successful for comparable booking services like Thumbtack.

Style Guide

I also created a style guide using colors that reflect a craftsmen style theme like sage, russet brown and blue -greens. We wanted to define our target user persona for small informal business providers as people who work their hands, crafty handy people, thus the craftsmen style was fitting.

With our styleguide in place, we were able to quickly design high fidelity prototypes for our web developers within a matter of one week.

Research and Insight

Our research focused on discovering what the customer and the service provide value the most in an online booking system. After conducting a survey, 13 participants responded. We discovered that customers see ratings as the most important feature they look at. We also discovered that service providers mainly want customers to see images of their past work on their profile.

These research validated most of our initial design. The changes that we implemented after research where:

1. Allowing the customer to add reviews ratings and upload pictures of services completed.

2. Creating a text box over each picture for image description

3. An faq pop up box

4. Detailed customer contact information for review by customer in the booking confirmation page.

Metrics

We do not have the resources yet measure our proximity to our goal.

However, A report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) indicated that small businesses that leverage digital tools and technologies can expect to grow their revenue 2.5 times faster than those that do not.

Solution

Our design solution was to include features that:

Provide brand awareness - service provider profile photo, images of completed work
Expand reach - share to social media button
Customer engagement - customer ratings, messaging (for future iteration)
Sales/bookings - payment processing feature

Whats Next?

At this stage, we have successfully developed and prepared an MVP that is now ready for alpha testing. Our primary objective was to design the MVP specifically for one type of service provider, auto repair. Through this process, our design team has gained valuable insights and identified key areas of improvement.

One key lesson learned is to have frequent meetings between designers and developers, enhancing collaboration. Allocating more time for early usability testing proved to be crucial. Seeing my UX/UI design come to life as functional code by skilled developers was truly exhilarating!

FRANCESCA L.