Branding Research & Website Development

SUMMARY

What was created?

Mane House Salon is a hair salon that wanted to develop an e-commerce site in order to retail stylist-approved hair products to their clients during the 2020-2021 pandemic.

TIMELINE

This was a 72-hour design sprint.

MY ROLE

Lead Researcher & Designer

I was the only person working on this project. Listed below were my primary duties and responsibilities:

• Research plan development

• Informative Interview Questionnaire design and conduction

• Qualitative data synthesis (gathered insights by affinity mapping all of the qualitative and quantitative data)

• Formulation of hypothesis and solution statement (combined user archetype with business needs)

• Archetypes

• Branding guidelines

  • Color palette

  • Typography.

  • Imagery

  • Voice and brand language

• E-commerce website development

PROBLEM

What was at stake?

Hairstylists from Mane House Salon were having a mass inquiry of clients asking if they had any recommended products that they approve to administer at home, during quarantine in the 2020-2021 covid-19 pandemic. As a result, they would like to develop an e-commerce site to sell the products they recommend. Additionally, they would like to re-design their website to suit their audience in order to meet the needs of their business and clients.

SCOPE & CONSTRAINTS

This design sprint occurred during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and I was a solo researcher and designer for this assignment.

RESEARCH

Discover

What did I need to know before designing a hair salon website?

In order to understand the Mane House Salon’s business goals for their website, I conducted informative interviews with the business owner that helped me to define the following:

• Target audience: Age range, genders, and income ranges.

• Brand Guidelines: Logos, color palette, typography, imagery, voice, and tone.

Define

What did I need to know about the users/target audience?

My strategic plan to designing for an experience that the users would love was to define the following questions:

5 W’s

• Who?: Who is going to be the target audience?

  • Millennial and Gen-Z users, predominantly women

• What?: What tools, resources, and sites are they using in order to buy salon-trusted hair products?

• Where?: Where do they seek salon-trusted products?

• Why?: Why did having a large picture of their behaviors matter?

• & How: Ultimately how did their behaviors drive their decisions to purchase products or not?

Design

Designing The Website

ARCHETYPES

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

BRANDING GUIDELINES AND STYLE

Execution

Execution of Surveys and Interviews

We worked together to strategically engage BIPOC creatives to participate in our research. Our strategy was :

1. Online Survey: Google Forms, keep it under 3mins. Distribute on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, email, text messages, and word of mouth.

2. Interviews- follow up on responses provided from the online surveys to dig deeper into the challenges that creative BIPOCs encounter.

Synthesis

Data Synthesis Results

My team synthesized the data with post-its and looked to identify common themes and pain points that would help us create a product that catered to this population’s needs.

Deduce

Deduce The Findings

Our team spent a whole evening selecting the common themes within our data synthesis process and came to a few conclusions that helped us arrive at our design decisions. Here are a few insights from our data:

• Newly graduated BIPOC creatives feel like they can’t compete with creatives who have over 5+ yrs of experience. As a result, mentoring was addressed numerous times as a type of support they wish they had.

• Creatives loathe job hunting primarily due to a lack of connections with the right people to land their desired jobs.

• Our participants expressed these feelings when job hunting:

  • lost

  • anxious

  • unpleasant

  • frustrated

  • inexperienced

  • inadequate

  • “want a fair chance,” as a prospective employee.

Share Findings

Sharing Research Findings with the Design Team

With our research findings in mind, we began to create paper prototypes with design solutions in mind that respond to the challenges that our audience was experiencing, and decided that as a team we would build a mentorship that would help our audience in the following ways:

1. Would provide mentorship opportunities with other well-established BIPOC creative professionals to show them HOW to leverage their talents and mentor them in their careers.

2. Networking opportunities so that they can build connections with people who can help them land an introduction to the department of their desired career opportunity.

DESIGN OUTCOMES

Phone Application

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RETROSPECTIVE

Challenges

Sample of Informational Interviews (N=4): The data collected through these interviews is generalizable to individuals who have used medical alert devices and their families. However, it would be beneficial for future iterations to interview other types of clients as well such as the client’s families.

Scope of time: As this project was a 2-week design sprint, the scope of time allotted for user interviews made it difficult to recruit participants and schedule interviews. With more time, we would have been able to connect with a larger sample size.

Final Thoughts

This project allowed for me to contribute to human-centered design based in empathetic research.

My previous experience as an environmental systems change researcher enhanced my contribution to this project, which depicts the importance of finding the underlying themes and patterns.

While synthesizing all of the qualitative research, we cultivated empathy by discovering unmet user needs and gained insights about how to best quantify them. I am content with how we implemented the findings into our design solution for Bay Alarm Medical’s products and services.