BePretty is the first urban guide in Latina America that in one hand, enables women to search, discover, and book beauty appointments
*To not disclose sensitive information, I have omitted some confidential information in this case study. The information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect views of Bepretty.
The client BePretty, on one hand, enables women to search, discover, and book beauty appointments and, on the other hand, allows professionals to scale their businesses by promoting and managing them online. With more and more venues and users joining their platform, BePretty's apps were in need of a rethink and redesign. To do this, they hired me to create a united customer experience that would help users easily search, discover, and book beauty appointments.
My role in this project was lead design of BePretty apps across iOS and Android. I worked together with their CTO and marketing team to ensure viability of implementation and brand coherence.
My approach to this project was to find the best solution for each situation, whether it be finding and making an appointment, discovering a new venue or new services, rescheduling a booking, paying for a service and much more. This approach helped me meet the needs and wants of the users and the business. The approach employs basic research methods, such as analysis and testing, user experience, user interface, and prototyping as well. See the diagram below to get a better sense of the approach
In August 2015 BePretty launched their apps, and since then they've gone from strength to strength in online booking. Unfortunately , since the app's launch, it hadn't seen the love or attention it deserved in terms of product design and customer experience. The company was growing fast and closing more and more partnerships with venues, and this led to severe problems with showing new venues and services to the right customers. This problem could not be fixed by a simple adjustment of layouts. So, in the middle of 2016 Tiago Pais, CTO of BePretty, approached me to help rethink some aspects of their apps and redesign both their iOS and Android apps. Acting as their lead product designer, I was challenged to create a mobile experience that adapts to each customer's preferences, and at the same time I was challenged to reach some business goals, like new venue discovery.
Due to BePretty's rapid growth, there was plenty of data available to us. So we used this information to define accurately their base in terms of the way these users behaved and to select several possible use cases for the app.
During research for the process, I was thinking about the different target groups. For my example the persona group should be women in the age range of 20–35, single, with 0–1 children, employed, and comfortable with using a mobile device for shopping. With the most common scenarios in place, we were able to define proto-personas, using all the information available. Sneak peek of what the personas looked like:
“Luxury today is getting what you want, how you want it, when you want it, getting a very personalised experience.”
With planning and understanding of the length of the problems we wanted to solve, we were able to move forward into creating wireframes and user flows for the app. I made the decision to go with low-fidelity because that allowed us to focus more on the functionality and structure of the app.
Design is no longer about merely one single product or platform. In the BePretty case the design system was about an ecosystem where it could easily enable me to create and manage better iterations, new features, and new products along the road with many different elements or organisms.
Usually when working in software development and design, speed demands that I quickly deliver solutions before I think they are completely ready to ship. So with this project my goal wasn't to create the most beautiful system, but instead to create the most useful system that would meet business and customer needs and give me more flexibility to iterate quickly.
One major change in the app was to focus on discovery. My goal was to improve venue and services discovery by understanding more about a user's personal preferences, allowing me to predict and tailor more relevant services or venues to each individual user. We also needed to create a simpler way to display services and venues to users. The ultimate solution was organising services and venues into horizontal sliders with simple hierarchies that users could understand easily.
Redesigning the search allowed us to create a simpler and easier way for users to search and gather suggestions for relevant services and venues. Based on their preferences we also created a feature that allows users to save their favorite venues with only one tap or to book from past services. (Based on data, users were referring to booking history to make new bookings, which, at a glance, does not seem to make too much sense, but after reconsideration it makes total sense because people usually go to the same hairdresser every time they need a cut.)
The booking or checkout process is a very sensitive area of every business, and here this was no different. Making the user feel safe and creating an easy to use booking process was a must. So the solution was to simplify the process with only two steps. After the user selects a service, (step 1 ->) they’re able to select a day and time-slot from a list with all the availabilities for that service and choose the professional that will do the service. Once the day and time are selected, users can easily (step 2 ->) select the payment options of a credit card or of paying at the venue before the service, and the service is booked.
One of the most important things when working with other people is clear communication. Many times people have difficulty getting a sense of how a product feels, so we created a working prototype with animations and interactions.
Prototyping was the most effective way to gain understanding and feedback"
BePretty, leading the Colombian and Chilean markets, is developing tremendous change in the way beauty is consumed in all of South America. The results have exceeded expectations. Since the launch of the redesign of BePretty on iOS and Android, the number of active customers has increased by 56%. The median active days per customer has increased by 50%. The new customer retention rate has increased by 31%.
Personally, I am very proud of what I accomplished for BePretty, but I believe that a great design takes time and wisdom, which is only possible if the entire team is in position with an accompanying mindset to learn. In the end, it comes down to the ability to collaborate with others and to unite the right people for the right job.
BePretty is the first urban guide in Latina America that in one hand, enables women to search, discover, and book beauty appointments
