Belle ( previously known as Bangs) is a design-driven, web-app booking system for managing bookings and payments in salons. It incorporatesan AI system to predict customers' behavior and automated marketing.

Introduction

Currently the project just spin out of the Founders Factory's Incubator, however, it has grown to an independent company with a CEO, CTO, and a Product Owner. The team (of just Belle project) is growing fast, and soon it will be a team of over 10 people.


The project has gained a great deal of consensus from all involved stakeholders, attracting L'Oréal to invest millions of dollars (figures not yet revealed) directly into the company as well as planning a worldwide Roll Out in 2018.

The challenge

The beauty sector is growing fast, especially the hairstyle and fashion market.
The new millennials' generation uses technology at every decision-making stage and the influence of social networks has a great impact in all areas.
 

The challenge was to find a billion-dollar opportunity that contributed to solving a big problem and helped bring innovation in the beauty industry.

Project Process

While the project wasn't a linear process, for the sake of presenting this case study in logical parts, I've broken down our product cycle into five main phases:

1. Problem discovery
2. Solution discovery
3. UI
4. Development
5. Iterations

1. Problem discovery

We decided to research the wide range of problems in the beauty industry, and we started using a human centred design and lean start-up approach from the early stages of product development. We were clear about our constraints:

• We did not have a lot of time
• We needed to measure the impact of anything we built
• We wanted to be able to produce something that could scale quickly

As a Product designer, I began my research with three major activities:

• User interviews
• Personas
• Opportunity Workshops

In the first phase of the process, given our unique type of collaboration with L’Oréal, we started to conduct a series of interviews and opportunity workshops with the various internal departments.

Our purpose:

• Finding growing markets
• Identifying potential growing products
• Discovering pain points

Below, a list of the stakeholders' problems we found.

Beauty sector's problems:

• No access to consumers’ data in the salons (trendy hairstyles, color, product preferences etc ...) due to the software currently used and the fragmented market
• No possibility to predict sales in the saloons and to identify new market trends based on customer activities
• Product Warehouse management

We've identified many other issues in the Beauty industry, however, I created a list of those related to the product Belle.

After conducting the research with L'Oréal we identified other stakeholders related such as the salons and the salons' customers, so we started to conduct interviews with various salons' managers, receptionists, hairdressers and customers.

By conducting over 10 interviews with several salons and employees we identified the following issues:

Salons' problems:

• There are no products covering all phases of salons management: from booking to inventory management and payment
• Personnel Management
• Very old softwares used (not accessible from smartphones or from home)
• Expensive softwares used
• Few marketing tools

Consumers problems:

• Consumers are unable to get the latest style trends and do not know where the best hair stylists are
• Many salons are not on Treatwell and other platforms (very fragmented market)
• Many people never change salon and style for fear of an unfit hairstyle

After identifying some issues in the industry, we conducted a competitor and benchmarking analysis with the Business Development and Data Scientist's team, in order to map the list of competitors and their features.

• Bad UX
• Bad Information Architecture
• Not multi-device supported
• Bad customer support
• Lack of important features
• Bad business model

Two potential solutions:

We ended up choosing the B2B because we found it a fascinating challenge to design technology for someone who is tired of it. Also, given our limited time, getting testing data for this user type was going to be much easier to get into the market.

2. Solution Discovery

To collect our initial research findings in one place and to provide the team with a central point of information regarding the project, I wrote a detailed brief.

Problem

In the brief, we defined the problem that we wanted to solve as follows:
60% of the salons still use paper and pen to handle bookings and do not collect customer data because the software is too expensive and very difficult to use.
There are no softwares able to handle all the bookings' stages:

• Booking
• Payment
• Inventory management
• Marketing and promotions

Solution hypothesis

We defined our proposed solution as:
Create a free design-driven platform to help reinvent the salon appointments' applications.
The goal is to collect data and help salons to better understand their customer's needs.

Approach

We defined our approach as:
Create an MVP that would allow us to distribute the product quickly in just 4 months and then continuously and iteratively improve it.

Generating rough concepts

To get both conceptual and usability feedback, we performed tests using a mix of paper, InVision and Principle prototypes. In two rounds of tests, we tried over a dozen concepts, with the most interesting ones presented below:

Assumption: Build an Application for iPad and Android
Goal: Create a tablet application so that each salon can handle appointments very easily.
User feedback: Negative, many salons have more than 20 stylists to manage daily. The tablet is too small to visualize the entire calendar and manage more than 5 stylists easily.