When I first started working with Jeff, the founder of Fyyne, we wanted to created a platform for independent hair artists to easily manage their bookings and monitor the growth of their businesses.
As freelancers, a lot of time is spent on communicating with clients, strategizing to promote their businesses, and tracking their revenue. While there are many tools that help artists to do all these things separately, they have to jump between different platforms just to manage their work.
Fyyne Pro is an all-in-one platform that allows freelance artists to showcase their work via a digital portfolio, have control over their bookings, and keep track of their earnings.
To get a better understanding of independent artists’ workflow, we conducted 3 interviews to learn about their day-to-day tasks and pain points related to maintaining their businesses.
After analyzing and contextualizing the pain points, the team defined some goals to help us develop a plan of action and ideation.
Before I joined Fyyne, the team had already developed a working demo. After doing research and understanding the users, I took this opportunity to familiarize myself with the existing product and analyze the UX, to identify areas of improvement.
At this point of the process, we hadn’t defined our brand visuals yet as we wanted to focus on the UX, which explains the inconsistent design language and screen sizes in these iterations.
Working in a fast-paced startup environment, we were constantly getting feedback from users to inform our quick iterations. We began with some mid-fidelity wireframes to visualize some of our ideas and later progressed to high-fidelity designs as we heard back from users and solidified the visual.
We first brainstormed and made assumptions about what information would artists care about the most.
We started with a focus on revenue and recent activity. After getting feedback from users, we learned that they care most about seeing trends in their earnings and engagement with customers, followed by top requested services.
To help artists neatly organize their customers, we wanted to focus on customer management as one of the main user goals. However, we realized that this gets hard to keep track of as the list of customer profiles grow.
After getting feedback and multiple iterations, we got rid of customer profiles, and shifted the goal to booking management and communication with customers via messages.
As we shift focus from managing individual customer, we switched to an activity based notification feed, showing booking requests and details, and profile activity such as likes from customers.
Simplify bookings - no more back and forth with customers, seeing all upcoming bookings at a glance.
Business growth - keeping track of revenue and performance.
Work showcase - allowing artists to maintain a digital portfolio and engage with customers.
Fyyne is a two-sided platform, besides the artist facing product, the team also worked on solving for those who would want to look for independent artists and services in their area.
Currently, people would browse and find inspiration on social media platforms like Instagram, and make a booking through direct messages or a third-party site like Squire. While this works, it creates a lot of logistical issues for both the customer and the artist as it takes users to different apps just to manage their appointments.
As we worked on the artist-facing side of Fyyne first, we carried that over to craft an experience for customers to find inspiration, discover artists, and book their services.
Since Fyyne is customer-facing and very reliant on appealing visuals and imagery while they browse, we decided to study some of the existing products that are also very image-focused, such as Pinterest and Instagram.
Both Pinterest and Instagram use a grid view with proper white space to show several posts in an overview, easy for quick glancing and searching
Pinterest has an irregularly-shaped grid to show the full aspect ratio of posts, while Instagram restricts theirs to a square grid
Both platforms use a dark overlay on top of opened content for additional options, giving users confirmation that the action they’re taking is directly impacting the content behind it.
As we’re creating the customer-end of the product, we had to redefine the user goals. One constraint we had here was that we didn’t have immediate access to the right users for interviews and testing, so we did have to make assumptions and iterate as we implemented and got feedback from the App Store.
Discovering beauty services near you - browse on a visually-focused feed to stay up to date with trends, and see details of available services.
Book and pay right there, as soon as you find a style or service you’re interested in - no need to switch to another payment app.
Dive into a community of people who share the same interests as you. Whether it’s hair care, or getting an opinion on your next cut, you can connect with others and hear their insights.
It was an amazing learning opportunity for me to join Fyyne as the first designer, building the experience from ground up in a fast-paced startup environment where the requirement is ever-changing. I had to make a lot of quick decisions, even if that means skipping over certain steps in the design process, just to get the product out to the hands of the users and get their feedback.
In addition to building out the user experience of the apps, I also established a foundation for the design team and created a structured process for developers and designers to work together, allowing new members of the team to quickly get up to speed.
After 2 years of working on Fyyne, it was recently acquired by Nigeria-based company Bumpa.
