Role: Product Designer - UX/UI Analytics Specialist
Time Frame: Jan - April 2024
Beauty salons face challenges in effectively monitoring inventory, resulting in product wastage and financial losses. The objective is to create an analytical system that integrates inventory, sales, and product wastage data to enable informed decision-making and enhance profitability
The website's data-driven decision-making, enhanced efficiency, and cost reduction features streamline inventory management, enabling salon owners to make strategic business decisions, improve operational efficiency, and minimize product wastage.
As a product designer for the Lumiere Salon app, I leverage my finance background to design analytics features like the Total Inventory page and Product Wastage insights. These tools enhance operational efficiency, empower businesses, and support employees, fostering a professional work environment.
I've embraced a design thinking approach that enables me to deeply empathize with customer needs, generating evidence-based ideas to drive innovative solutions.
Tools Used
In January 2024, a UX research study was conducted over four days to deeply understand the unique needs and preferences of beauty salon operators in Vancouver regarding inventory management and analytics. Through structured phone interviews with three salon employees, including two from independent salons and one from a franchise, the focus was on their current inventory practices, methods for tracking product expiry, and processes for sales and inventory reporting.
From these interviews, a clear consensus emerged: there is a strong desire to reduce manual tasks related to inventory and expiry management, minimize product wastage, and gain visual insights through analytics on inventory, top-selling products, and wastage trends. These improvements are aimed at boosting efficiency within their salon operations.
User Interview and Conduct:
The initial interview revealed that:
User Persona
Our research identified key challenges faced by beauty salon businesses, including a prevalent reliance on pen-and-paper inventory management. This manual approach, disconnected from point-of-sale systems, requires laborious and error-prone manual counting of stock. Salon owners also struggle with managing products nearing expiration and monitoring opened items with limited "period-after-opening" (PAO), leading to excessive product wastage and financial losses.
There is also a demand for detailed analysis of inventory and sales data within beauty salons. Manual inventory management hinders understanding of product trends, demand changes, and overall business performance. Introducing a system that analyzes inventory, sales, and product wastage will help salon owners make informed decisions about restocking, pricing, and promotions, streamlining operations, and boosting profitability and competitiveness in the beauty industry.
After completing the Empathize and Define stages through persona development, our focus shifted towards Ideation and Design. We meticulously mapped out the information architecture and delineated user flows to ensure a coherent user experience. Subsequently, we embarked on crafting initial wireframes that depicted essential user journeys. These wireframes served as a foundation for developing mid-fidelity prototypes, which were rigorously tested with users to glean valuable insights. Incorporating feedback from these tests, we iteratively refined the prototype and optimized user flows. This iterative process culminated in the creation of higher-fidelity mockups, aligning the design closely with user expectations and usability standards.
Competitors
Lumière faces competitive benchmarking, revealing oversaturation from three majorplayers in the salon inventory management sector: Fresha, Phorest, and SalonScale. We conducted a thorough audit of thesecompetitors to compare key features,including barcode scanning, report wasted,low-stock and expiration notifications, andinventory product analytics.
Following our research and benchmarking against competitors, we have refined these features to enhance user experience. Our goal is to provide salon owners with superior tools for inventory control and insightful analytics, aiding them in making informed purchasing decisions.
Card Sorting
To facilitate visualization of the user flow, conducting card sorting is essential. It helps organize and structure information in a way that aligns with user expectations and navigation preferences.
User flow - Overall
User flow - Review Analytic and Export Report
Refined Wireframe after Improvements
Usability study & Insights
After creating my initial wireframe, I conducted usability testing with five individuals face-to-face at Langara. From this testing, I gathered three key findings for enhancing my design area.
Areas to Improve
Finding 1: Navigation tab on analytic
Finding 2: Selecting a date for viewing analytics
Finding 3: Chart Hover
We have come to the most end stage of creating mockups and prototypes after defining the problems and developing solutions, which will be handed over to the developers. This marks the completion of the UI design after extensive usability testing and wireframe improvements to ensure optimal functionality.
The showcase took place in April 2024, featuring three guest speakers. After everyone had the opportunity to test our product, we received not only compliments but also valuable feedback for our project, particularly regarding my analytical contribution.
Learning
The total inventory should include the monetary value of all items, enhancing financial transparency and budget management.
Using various data visualizations, like bar charts instead of just pie charts, helps users understand trends and durations more effectively.Highlighting the financial loss from product wastage on the wastage page allows users to grasp cost implications, optimize inventory management, and improve profitability.
A comprehensive and user-friendly approach to inventory management ensures users have all the information needed to make informed decisions and optimize operations.
