Project Overview

Why This

The expansive health and wellness sector is continuously developing and encompasses a wide spectrum of elements pertaining to physical, mental, and emotional well-being. In recent years, there has been a worldwide upsurge in this industry as people increasingly prioritize their physical fitness and overall well-being, recognizing its positive impact on their mental health.

As consumer health awareness grows and technology continues to reshape the delivery of health and wellness services, this industry is expected to undergo further transformation. Platforms like Mindbody exemplify how technology can facilitate easier access to these services for consumers and offer business owners the means to provide them.

About

Mindbody is a cloud based software that provides scheduling and business management software for the health and wellness service industry. They were founded in 2001 and have been the leading software for over 58,000 businesses world wide.

Problem Statement & Solution

 My Role & Responsibility

 Design Process

This project was extremely complex and had many layers to it. Inspired by IDEO, my design process is deep rooted into my day to day work flow, with continuous learning and iterating. Rinse and repeat.

Empathize

Competitive Analysis

The competitive analysis allows a clear understanding of the strengths and weakness of the competition in the industry and how they compare to our software. There are a number of scheduling softwares available, but none seemed to be as robust as Mindbody.

What I Did

• Full dive into entire software, documenting the end-to-end experiences with screen shots, separated by navigation tabs.

• Mapped the general information architecture.

• Highlighted unique features or experiences that I found interesting for inspiration.

• 12-15 Competitors were captured.

User Research

I worked closely with the user research team to identify and plan sessions with our customers. This was a great way to really empathize with our users and hear firsthand the challenges they face with their daily business operations.

Objective: Understand the current pain points of the legacy software and what the needs are for future feature request.

Methods Used: Both Qualitative and Quantitative

Timeline: This research expanded across two years, and typically 1-2 weeks at a time.

Quantitative Research

• Kano Surveys - A method used to identify what features customers want.

• Pendo - A third party tracking software that gathers data on user behavior.

• Feedback forms, most often in the form of in product pop-ups.

Key Research Takeaways

• Class set-up and editing: The ability to edit classes for one off occurrences, create intervals, easily duplicate a class or make easy edits to the class schedule.

• Changes to class offerings and schedules occur often. Customers use multiple hacks in attempt to avoid the painful process and frustration.

• Appointments: The ability to book and edit recurring appointments without needing to delete the whole sequence and easier ways to create a group booking.

• Easier access to important “in the moment” client information such as, past bookings, staff alerts/notes, and payment information.

• Waitlist is confusing, unreliable too complex to use, requiring a lot of manual efforts to manage. Appointment and class based businesses have different needs.

• Appointment schedules need to be very flexible, and customers don’t want to spend a lot of time editing settings to make their calendar accurate.

Define

User Personas

Developing user personas is essential for maintaining a clear understanding of the intended audience, each having unique requirements. This becomes crucial in ensuring that all users engaging with the product can successfully accomplish their workflow tasks.

Empathy Map

Empathy maps allow for a visualization of deeper understanding into our users thoughts and feelings.

Journey Maps

Ideate

Understanding Legacy Software

The complexity of our scheduling software required hours of using and trying to gain understanding of common workflows. Each schedule type (i.e: Classes, Appointments, Workshops) had their own way of creating, viewing and managing events.

We originally set out to build a unified system that had universal event that could be used across varies event types. However we discovered this is not the mental modal our customers preferred.

User Flows

With a complex system, user flows are extremely valuable to communicate to other team members and find alignment.

Card Sorting

Information Architecture

Mapping the information architecture is a good way to get clear on how the information is organized across the product to see how a user may complete a task.

Design

Low Fidelity Wireframes

I used low Fidelity wire frames to explore different layouts and information hierarchy. It’s also a great way to gut check direction with the team or get initial feedback from an engineering perspective.

Design System

The legacy software had over 4 different visual styles from the half complete iterations over the years. As we move forward with the redesign initiative, we created a new design system to slowly move towards more consistent design and UX patterns. With the components we established clear guidelines and specs for development.

High Fidelity

Based on initial feedback and further business requirements, the high fidelity designs are linked together in a prototype to take back for user testing. With the new design system we can pass along consistent designs to the engineering team.

New Appointment Solution

New Experience Highlights

• Easily book multi-service appointments with different service providers.

• Most important client information available upfront, keeping user in work flow.

• Booking with prep and clean up time integrated and visible on calendar.

• Panel flyout design allows for easier multi-tasking with larger view.

• Group Bookings with individual service and staff, a much desired request.

Outcome

Though much time was spent on these designs, and they tested well during user interviews, the business decided to put the Appointment refresh on hold due to the complexity, resourcing and change in priorities.

New Class Sign-in Solution

New Experience Highlights

• Clean user interface, allowing user to focus on tasks at hand

• Dedicated waitlist, with improved automation and detail

• Panel flout design allowing for easier multi-tasking

• Reduced visual clutter, highlighting the most important contexual information

Legacy Class Sign-in

New Class Management Solution

By leveraging micro-experiences, I was able to combine 5+ different screens into one, more intuitive and seamless work flow, allowing for quick edits.

Legacy Class Management

Test

Usability Testing

The objective was to verify and thoroughly assess the latest end-to-end scheduling concepts with businesses that rely on appointments and classes. We conducted numerous rounds of qualitative user testing throughout the year. Elaborate prototyping enabled us to demonstrate the workflow as closely as possible to its final production state.

Tasks Given

• Complete booking an appointment with multiple services.

• Create a booking that for a group of four clients, all with different services and providers.

• Create a new class based service offering that meets every other week.

• Using the class sign-in roster, gather the necessary information and payment details to mark them as arrived for the class.

• Edit an existing class.

Observations & Findings

• Users really gravitated to the more modernized look and and new features they had been requesting.

• Diverse companies have very specific needs, that requires a lot of customization. This becomes a challenge to make changes to the complex legacy software.

• Users for appointment and class based business have very different needs and their workflows require access to different client information.

• Multi tasking with a split view is more necessary for appointment based businesses so they have easy access to the calendar. For class based businesses they preferred a full screen experience for the class sign-in roster as that is their primary task at hand.

Next Steps

More Work