New times require new solutions
Helping a small business to rebuild after the pandemic loss
Project date:
June 2021
Role:
UX designer
Tools:
Marvel, Figma
Team project
Project summary
The Nail & Beauty centre is a beauty saloon positioned in the centre of Berlin, right in the business area of the city. The saloon is run by Anna who is currently the only worker in the saloon. Just a little more than a year ago, Anna wasn’t alone in a saloon. Unfortunately, she had to let go of all of her employees as a consequence of lock-downs and the huge impact COVID-19 pandemics had on the German economy. Now, Anna is struggling with overwork, physical fatigue and an unsure financial situation.
After introducing Anna’s case to us, Brainster Academy asked us to help Anna by finding new opportunities for her business.
The roadmap of our project was:
- Stakeholder interviews
- Research and synthesis
- Stakeholder meeting
- Ideation and prototyping
- User testing
- Stakeholder pitch
The challenge
The first thing we needed to do to understand Anna’s situation better, was to talk to Anna. So we scheduled the stakeholder interview and prepared the questions.
After a detailed analysis of Anna’s problem during the interview, we agreed that our main challenge was to help Anna reduce her physical work and stabilize her income.
The research
Now that we had the challenge, the next thing we needed to do was to understand the field and our customers better.
Our team of five divided the tasks to:
- Desk research: to see what new solutions pandemic brought that we didn’t know about, to find more about the male segment in the industry and to investigate the ‘’do it yourself’’ approach
- Competitors analysis: to realise how competitors tackled the problems and handled the pandemic
- User interviews: to understand our customer's needs and pains
The synthesis
When all information from the research were gathered, the synthesis was necessary. With everything we found out, we built our Persona — Eva.
Eva is a 40-year-old businesswoman, a mother and a hygiene aware loyal customer. Having Eva in mind we built User Journey and an Empathy map.
Now it was the time for Anna to meet Eva. For further progress and moving to the ideation part and really offering the solutions, it was a key to find out if ‘’we’re on the same page’’ with Anna. After one more stakeholder interview, we’ve got a ‘’green light’’ from Anna to continue our work.
The ideation
The next phase of our process was to find solutions that are most tangible and to incorporate them into the prototype.
We turned on our solution mode and started brainstorming all possible ideas. We put them all together on Marvel board and used prioritization metrics to realize which ideas are more tangible than others. As there were five of us, we couldn’t agree at first which ideas to go with as a solution. So we approached to it democratically, by voting.
As voting was finished, our ideas narrowed to three main concepts:
- Workshops; providing an educational service
- Memberships; possibility to be a member of the saloon and have benefits of service
- Improving website
Now that we had our solutions, we had to test how the users would respond to it. We then did another round of testing.
As a prototype we made a presentation with the different approaches to our solutions. The user could choose between approaches, but needed to explain why did she or he choose exact one. The questions asked were about willingness to participate in workshops, the methods of workshops, things they would like to learn, they were also asked to choose between different models of memberships etc.
The solution
After realising how good responds for our solutions we received after second round of user interviews, we were ready to present our ideas to Anna.
At presentation with our stakeholder Anna, we introduced her to which opportunities we see in the problems she was having.
Opportunity 1 : Reducing Anna’s physical work.
As Anna had to let go of all of her employees, for more than a year and a half she is doing the whole work in a saloon. She was fatigued and overworked and was trying to find a solution to reduce her physical stress without losing an income.
After researching and minutely analysing her problem, we came to a realisation that Anna should use her long time experience as a beautician and re-brand herself as an expert in the field. Our idea was based on our customers needs and wants to learn more about beauty trends, products, ingredients and do-it-yourself methods at home. That way Anna would still be in touch with people, which she loves about the job, but wouldn’t put too much physical work on herself and would still earn money.
Opportunity 2: Stabilizing Anna’s income.
Offering a memberships plans should be the way to keep loyal customers and to invite new one’s to the saloon. The more loyal customers Anna has, the more stable her income would be. By offering models that fits do different types of consumers, there would be a bigger possibility they would agree to subscribe.
Conclusion
The final pitch at the stakeholder presentation went very well. We definitely planted a seed in Anna’s mind of something that can be a lot bigger in the future. We felt like we pushed her into other direction of thinking and that somehow everything landed on a fertile ground.
My team was very proud with what we did at this project. Each of us learned a lot about the process of research, doing stakeholder interviews, doing the user interviews, realising client’s limitations and understanding ‘’the bigger picture’’ of the field itself.
This whole process for sure was demanding, but at the end it really warmed my heart seeing all the progress that we did and seeing Anna’s reaction to it. Considering our confusion after the first interview with the stakeholder and not knowing what to do further and then finishing with something that’s so great, it really makes you think what are the boundaries of this job at all. At first I thought it's just making websites, but it happens to be so much more and I already love it.
