About Pairi

Pairi Inc. is a startup which helps freelancers of appointment-based businesses get booked for services through social media and organize all their business logistics in one place. Pairi's software saves time and earns more money for freelancers by automatically taking care of repetitive business logistics many of them face like scheduling, deposits, online payment, appointment reminders, contracts, taxes, and more, so they can focus on their passion and serving more clientele.

What’s the problem?

Pairi wanted to improve their platform user experience to grow their business and build trust with their customers. Their initial request was to just improve the HTML components like tables, dropdowns, cards etc so that they looked consistent.

After studying the existing product experience, I took it upon myself to go beyond the client’s request and work upon the front-end web experience for the marketplace.

This way, Pairi will be equipped with a brand UI Kit as well as the visual designs which demonstrate the use of the UI kit components, adhering to a better user experience.

Learning about the existing design resources

Pairi Inc.’s brand message is: No Learning Curve, No Hassle, No Code. They already had a brand logo and a color palette of primary colors. These brand resources (along with a few little additions) will be used to redesign the platform marketplace using one of their customer’s business as a reference - IndiFit.

(This has been agreed upon by all parties which includes Pairi Inc. and IndiFit )

High-level design objectives

After hearing out the client’s requirements, I immediately listed out the initial design objectives, that were agreed upon by the client:

• Redesigning (tweaks to existing experience and create a UI Kit for future use while developing other marketplaces)

• Create a responsive website landing page for Pairi Inc.

• Make the booking process as quick and intuitive as possible.

• Give business users better control over account interface.

• Just KISS(Keep It Simple, Silly) and yet provide an engaging experience for both the customers and service providers.

Competitive Analysis

I studied various online marketplace providers like Sharetribe and Yo!Kart to understand how the platforms operated. In the process, I also grasped what they offered to the customers and service providers. Listing all the required data, I compared it all with Pairi app’s existing system.

Understanding the users’ needs

I wanted to understand how the online marketplace works from both service provider’s and customer’s point of view. So, I decided to have a chat with the service providers and the customers who booked those services.

I conducted the user interviews with participants who used such marketplaces (like Vagaro) to host their services and also the customers, who bought their services. I also spoke to the IndiFit staff.

Interview goals

• How does the online service marketplace affect the users' lives?

• How do users manage their marketplace platform?

• What do the users look for while choosing the marketplace for hosting the online courses/classes?

• What factors affect the users' decision while booking an online service?

• How do the users find out about the marketplace?

• How do the users manage their booking process?

Findings

I had a discussion with IndiFit to collect data regarding their current experience with the Pairi app. I also got an idea of why business owners like IndiFit prefer platforms like Pairi. The enlisted data points helped me to figure out what could be included into the landing page to increase Pairi’s business.

Building empathy

After studying the research findings and understanding the pain points of both the customers as well as the service providers, I came up with the personas. Pairi App has three personas:

1. Admins

2. Service Providers

3. Customers

But keeping in mind the scope and the timeline of the project, I decided to focus on the experience for the Service Providers and Customers.

Ideating the experience

I saw the listing images on the original page and realized that the listing images were repeating as service providers did not bother to change those images while creating new listings.

I was in a pickle - to include the listing images or to not include the listing images. The voice of the selfish visual designer in me told me not to include the images as the repeating images, which had no uniformity and no consistency would ruin the balance of the page design. Also, from the UX design point of view, I felt the images were more distracting and did not bring any value to the experience. In my opinion, the listings could survive by itself without the images, as the listings were not associated with physical products to be sold. Instead, the relevant information about the service like location, time, price and who is the service provider should be enough. But I decided to work on both the versions so that the decision can be made after some A/B testing.

The Redesign

Marketplace

Users usually search for the services which are available in the nearby area based on their availability. So I decided to provide the primary search which consisted of the variables city and availability. I grouped the other variables like the class type, price etc under ‘Filters’.

The number of listings would increase day by day. Hence I decided to include the pagination that displayed only 9 listings at a time. The listing consists of the title, time, location, price and the instructor name.

Landing page

I decided to apply the branding to Pairi landing page as well.

Prototype

The prototypes for this project have been created using InvisionApp. You can view the prototype here.

Conclusion

I enjoyed working on this project because it gave me the opportunity to take initiative to provide a better solution to the problem space that was presented to me. However, if I had more time, I would have loved to see the A/B testing evaluation for the two versions of the designs that I created.

I was happy to get great feedback from Paris Mielke, CEO of Pairi Inc. Here’s what she had to say:

“Chetana was very professional, self-directed, and delivered exactly what we asked for according to the scope of the project (plus more!). We asked her for a branding kit and a redesign for some HTML tables and drop downs, but she delivered almost an entire app redesign based off of feedback from our users! Chetana is the type of designer who goes above and beyond what you initially asked for simply because she wants to, and I would recommend her to anyone looking to improve the design or user experience of their product.“