Personal UX Project: Future Design- Booking App for 7-11 Salon
Project Background
7-Eleven in Taiwan:7-Eleven is a multinational chain of retail convenience stores groups. In Taiwan, 7-Eleven not only sells bigger range of products but also provides many kinds of services, such as courier service, print service and order-to-make drinks, desserts. You can even pay your bills, taxes and fines with the barcodes or purchase train tickets and concert tickets in their Kiosks. And most of them stay open for 24 hours. Besides, you can join their membership and accumulate points to redeem the rewards or cash back.
Business Objectives: As one of the widespread convenience stores in Taiwan, the main purpose of 7-11 is to connect to people’s life closely and make their life easier. With the trending of digitalization, they want to invest more on developing digital services to enhance their customers’ satisfaction and reinforce their competitiveness. After launching gyms called “BEING Fit”, they decide to launch smart salon service. And hair washing robots are the main technology in this salon.
Design Goals
Design an app(iOS app) for customers booking services of the salon.
User Research
Quantitative Method: Online Survey
36 responses received (28 women and 8 men)
Key results:
What things will you look for when choosing a hair salon? Price (86%) → Location (55%) → Internal settings (52%) → Service attitudes (41%)
What service have you ever tried in a salon? Haircut (100%) → Hair wash (86%)
How often don you use salon services? Once every three months (41%) → Once every month (25%)
What payment methods do you usually use? Cash (91.7%) → Credit / Debit card (63.9%) → Mobile payment (47%)
What membership of convenience stores do you have? 7-Eleven (66.7%) → Family Mart (58.3%)
83.3% people think that providing hair product samples and customized hair care suggestions is appealing to them.
80.6% people are willing to try hair washing robots.
Qualitative Method: User Interviews
Most subjects are interested in hair washing robot service and the main reason is that they want to try new technology. It should be noted that they all guess that the price will higher than the traditional one. However, the hair washing robot service is designed to lower the cost of labor so it’s cheaper than traditional one.
All subjects have ever waited in line for the service or waited in their seat because their hairdressers need to deal with 2 to 3 customers’ hair at a time.
Most subjects schedule their haircut appointment via their hairdressers’ LINE account(A popular social networking app in Taiwan).
Female subjects, especially long-hair subjects, feel that washing their hair and blowdrying is exhausting.
When choosing a salon, subjects always refer to online reviews or word of mouth(mostly from their friends and family).
Most female subjects are care about the skills(both functional and emotional) of hairdressers.
Competitor analysis
Direct Competitors: Style Map, Booksy and Style Seat
Key Findings: Most competitors are more like platforms for beauty marketplace. They provide services for both business and customers. That is to say, customers can find a salon in their app and make an appointment and salons can use their booking system and promotion service in the app. However, This kind of service is not popular in Taiwan. People are used to contacting the salon or their hairdresser for appointment via phone or Line app.
Indirect Competitors: GOMAJI, FunNow
Key Findings: Those platforms mainly sell tickets about different kinds of entertaining experiences. Offering wide variety of products with good discounts is their strength.
Target Audience
The target audience I select are young females(20-35 years old) who like trying new technology and are used to fixing their hair in a salon. Then, I create a persona based on this target group.
POV Statement: Betty is a busy office lady who strives to have good work/life balance. Therefore, her schedule is always full so that she doesn’t have much time and energy to fix her hair. Therefore, she wants to find a salon which can provide efficient and customized services in order to always maintain the best status of her hair. And then her quality of life will be improved because her confidence will increase and time will be saved.
Ideation
HMW(How Might We) Statement and Brainstorming-Crazy 8 were implemented during the ideation process.
Results:
Concept to develop: How might we make the process of visiting salon interesting and meaningful.
Idea about this concept: The time that customers spend in the salon can turn into Open Points(The reward points of 7-eleven membership) or discounts of hair products.