Flair. Hairstyling on-demand
When I joined Flair, a newly funded venture, I was asked to
validate the product idea – an on-demand service for people who
need an hairdresser.
Learning from the feedback I gathered,
the team reframed the opportunity and
collaborated with a diverse pool of professionals,
hairdressers and potential clients
to understand the context better before moving forward.
With expert input and a range of research and
ideation methods, our team proposed and validated a revised
product vision.
Year & location
2015 - London, UK
Category of work
Service Design, Strategic Design, UX Design
Team composition
Service Designers [x2], Product Owner, Developer
Tailoring a service around people
In London, thousands of people rely on mobile hairstylists, who
conveniently provide hairdressing services in the comfort of their
clients’ domestic environment.
Just as Uber revolutionized
the landscape of transportation with the aid of modern technology, Flair
wanted to explore the opportunity of developing a digital product to
extend on-demand mobile hairstyling to anybody.
The preliminary
validation tests confirmed the assumption that
potential customers would be reluctant to allow a stranger into
their home.
In order to fully understand the context we decided to
undergo further research; teaming up with a second Service Designer, I
devised and facilitated three ideation workshops. Considering market and
desk research insights’ and tapping from the precious expertise of
domain specialists who attended our sessions, we spotted a range of
opportunities in the hairstyling industry.
We learned that hairstyling is deeply linked to many aspects of human
nature – for example, people tend to have a haircut when approaching a
big change in life.
The relational component of this interaction is even
more important in the domestic environment in which mobile hairstylists
operate.
After considering a wide range of visions, our team
decided to focus on ‘Providing a tailored on-demand service that matches
users’ needs with mobile-hairdressers’ skills and personality’.
Considering our two distinct audiences - mobile hairdressers and their
clients – had very different needs, we used a range of techniques to
define the idea in detail.
I conducted several in-person
interviews and shadowed a mobile hairdresser while she was at clients’
home to style their hair.
By investing time in qualitative research, I learned that for each
audience there were clear subsets of personas
with very different needs: for instance, full time mobile hairdressers
are happy to travel across the city to get to their clients, while part
timers would rather not to.
Designing a
features sorting excercise allowed the team to understand what
was important to our users, and prioritise the service components
accordingly - whether this meant developing an appointment scheduler for
stylist or assessing what hair-care products Flair should provide.
We then went on exploring different business models – as an example, we considered a ‘monthly subscription’ for haircare services – we tested multiple pricing options and prototyped the service using low fidelity prototypes – ensuring that the revised business idea was fully validated.
