Quarter-Long project in the Masters of Information Management Degree in the User Experience Specialization.
In the spring of 2022, I took IMT 565; Designing Information Experiences at the UW ISchool taught by Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock. This was my final class in my Information Management Degree needed to get my User Experience specialization. Through out the 10 weeks of this course behind the regular course content and lecture material, students were placed into groups and assigned to conduct an experience re-design project. This assignment was created to give the students the chance to conduct an experience design project from end-to-end, i.e., from concept to prototype to evaluation to presentation. I was in a group of 6 and our team name was "Team Super Hairos." This post gives an in-depth look into the process of how our team chose the experience we wanted to change and the rigorous UX design method we followed to get to our final project. We all took on equal roles in this project as UX designers and worked collaboratively throughout the process.
To being the project, we first had to settle on a specific experience we felt could be improved. After much individual brainstorming and pitching ideas, our team found that we all aligned with the struggles that individuals face when going to a hair salon to get their haircut. We created an initial value proposition to highlight what specifically we wanted to achieve in our redesign. The experience we want our customers to have should entail autonomy and pleasantness. The objective is that when a person walks out of a salon, they should feel confident and satisfied with their hair-do. We wanted the experience to be user friendly and highly intuitive with respect to the required information being provided at each step of their experience.
To investigate the primary idea, we collectively created a user interview script that had questions addressing 12 key topics about the haircut experience as it exists today. With this common script, we set out in pairs/individually to conduct a total of 13 user interviews. We then put down our findings from our interviews sectioned into the 12 key topics (on which our interview script was based) on a Miro board and also summarized key takeaways; here are a few of the questions and findings we put on sticky notes in Miro as well as our summary of common pain-points we observed from our users responses.
Users generally wish to have more information available about all services, to know all prices upfront, and to communicate with hair stylists more efficiently, easily, and effectively. Many users expressed their wishes for improvements in booking processes, information about wait times, knowledge about or ability to limit prices, and communication of different types - not being able to communicate their desired hairstyle using words/images alone, the uncertainty/unpredictability of the end result i.e. not being able to know what their desired haircut will look like on their face, communicating throughout the haircut so that both stylist and customer are on the same page, and finally giving truthful bad feedback.
We also learned that the success of a haircut experience is highly dependent on stylists. Users tend to pick a stylist and stick with that stylist for a positive haircut experience due to trust. We also learned that inexperienced stylists and the lack of information are common pain points among users.
Going directly to the users and ensuring we gathered insight from many different perspectives, we were able to get a holistic view of the generic haircut experience. Finding threads amongst these different perspectives shined light on where there were commonalities within the haircut experiences that we could use as the foundation to increasing our understanding of this experience as whole.
Our team now set off with these findings to brainstorm ideas on which we thought we could elevate the salon experience. We were tasked with coming up with 20 different ways to do this and then told to narrow those 20 ideas down to 10. We ensured through this process all individuals' ideas were heard and respected and we had rigorous discussions around how to narrow these ideas down and ensured there was strong rationale behind our final 10 choices. We identified the ideas that were solving pain points similar to those that the users faced in the investigation phase as well as the ones we felt offered the most value to improving the most issues from our user interviews. We did this both in in-person discussions as well as met via Zoom and collaborated on Miro.
Narrowing from 20 to 10 Ideas:
We continued the ideation process and use both Miro sketches and pen and paper to better visualize our top 10 ideas and help begin to see how we might end up designing some of these scenarios.
Now we were tasked with defining who our intended audience is. Although we wish we could've improved the salon experience for every individual, because of the infinite amount of different possible scenarios that define a "salon experience" we had to clearly define our intended audience's specific experience that we wished to alter. This would be our primary personae and would be our primary user we intend to design for. We then had to create a secondary personae, this individual would be an important, but secondary, audience that you intend to serve. With our primary personae we created her through identifying the personality and experience our ideas could best benefit as well as using traits from individuals we talked with in the investigation phase that we felt best aligned with our experience re-design. We identified our secondary personae as the stylist herself, we realized that the stylist is a very large factor in the haircut experience, and although we are not tailoring our re-design to improve their salon experience in particular, we acknowledged that their presence would be a vital component in ours redesign and also wanted to consider how improving the stylist's experience could vicariously improve our primary personae's as well. I took on the role of creating these personae for our team in Adobe XD.
We continued our ideation process by having more collaborative sessions where we created scenarios and partook in story telling activities to gain a greater understanding into our particular personae's experiences they may have with our various solutions now in place. These activities allowed us to see the different possibilities of experiences that our personae might have with each of our ideas and enabled us to identify what ideas fell short compared to others. Once these steps were completed we were able to narrow our ideas down into our final selection. This process involved a lot of open discussions and collaboration which made choosing one idea harder than if this was a solo effort. However having other individuals to speak and debate with, as well as hear their perceptions of our personae's experience with our various ideas, creates a stronger rationale as to why we choose the idea we did to be our final decision compared to if it was a solo effort. This process taught me how to be open and accepting of others ideas, while also being sure to stand my ground and advocate for my voice to be heard in these debates as well. We selected a single key scenario from these activities and began the initial stages of prototyping our experience redesign
Now that we have our experience problem space, our personae and our primary experience written as a scenario, we now proceeded to create a customer journey map. Our customer journey map showcases one central aspect of our customer's journey. We identify the emotions that our personae might be feeling as they proceed through our scenario. We identify any possible thoughts or questions they might and also the various peoples and things that are a part of each touch point, both on the 'front stage' being where our personae is aware of these people or things, as well as the 'back stage' being people or things our personae is not aware of but still contributes to how their experience functions as a whole. This entire process helps us in the prototyping stages as we are able to identify every component that will make up the experience of our user, as well as the various thoughts and feelings surrounding each touchpoint as they continue throughout our entire re-designed experience.
In addition to our Customer Journey Mapping, we then created a Lean Canvas to dive into the business aspect of our experience redesign. Our Lean Canvas is an overview of the haircut industry and we present ourselves as a start-up offering our re-design as a solution to the problems we identified with the experience their organization offers to customers. We identify our unique value proposition and relative cost structure that might take place if our re-design was to be implemented in various hair salons/ barbers. We clearly showcase the organizational problems and how our re-design offers solutions to give the businesses an unfair advantage in their market with our ideas in place. This process highlighted how feasible our solution would be cost-wise and implementation-wise for the hair styling industry. It helped us focus our solution and allows for others to see the value of our redesign in a clear and concise manner.
Our team then continued to build prototypes of our idea. Our re-design entailed both a digital prototype as well as a physical prototype. We had 3 rounds of prototyping and user tested both the physical and digital prototypes. We had user's partake in Guided Fantasy; the participants were asked to imagine the service as we talked about it and the narrative was supported with the help of visuals wherever needed. We used the Net Promotor score as our measurement of satisfaction from our users as well as jotted down verbal feedback as they tested our iterations. After each testing we made changes to both the physicals and digital parts of our prototype based on the feedback given. We ensured that the changes made still aligned with our initial goals and customer journey map. For example individuals felt uncomfortable with the idea of having a physical helmet they would have to put on to get a proper scan of their hair, due to this feed back, we iterated on this idea and instead of something that the users have to place on their head, we have a camera do the hair scanning. The camera is set up at the reception desk and the receptionist helps assist the individual to complete a 360 degree turn to allow the camera to get a full view of their hair and scan it into the device. In iteration 3 we made this even easier for the customer and footprints on the floor to show the user exactly what they needed to do in addition to the receptionist's guidance. We had very positive feedback with these changes.
We made adjustments to the digital element of our re-design as well based on feedback. We created our digital interface on Figma to showcase what the user would see on the IPad they would be given at the salon after their hair scan. We implemented a skip button on one of our final iterations to allow users the option to not use these features if they so please, and on our last user testing we had 0 individuals use the skip button, indicating to us our questions were appreciated by our users to help them have more autonomy over their salon experience. Some screenshots of our digital prototype are below and can also be seen in the video at the end of this page.
After we finished our user testing and iterations we had our final prototype. We created a short video that showcased our experience redesign from start to finish. It showcases our physical and digital implementations to the haircut experience that gives the users more autonomy over their haircut and leads to a greater satisfaction from both our primary and secondary personae. Some lessons my team and I learned during this experience includes:
Conducting this project from start to finish taught me the intricacies of a full UX design process. It showed me the many steps from brainstorming and ideation, body-storming and scenario telling, customer journey mapping and lean canvas creation, prototyping and user testing, to final implementation and providing strong rationale for our solution. This project was an invaluable experience that gave me in-depth knowledge about the UX process as a whole, and has helped me in defining my own personal UX best practices.
I am always open to comments and feedback on any of my projects; please do not hesitate to reach out and let me know of any questions or comments on this project!