soona
Challenge
Fast-casual professional photography and video studio, soona, wanted to make advancements to their online booking and shooting experience to increase customer conversion rates. soona asked for solutions that would facilitate a more informed progression through these processes for new customers, while also fitting within their tech constraints and brand guidelines.
Solution
Created annotated wireframes for focused new features that afford more feedback, clarity, and level-setting visuals, accommodating a wide variety of customer experience levels with photo/video to ensure that all feel included and confident during each step of the soona process.
Methodology
Stakeholder interview
Competitive Audit
User Journey Map
Development Scoping
Kano Analysis Model
Dot Voting
Rapid Prototyping
Annotated Wireframes
The Client
Get to Know soona
soona is a growing startup that’s not afraid to break the rules of professional photo and video content creation. At their offices in Denver and Minneapolis, soona provides affordable and fast digital content for customers who need product shots for their online merchandising, websites, and/or social media feeds. Customers book the shoot online, selecting their desired media, format, set details and desired shots, then ship or drop off their products to soona. Shoots can be attended in-person or viewed online, and once the customer has selected their shots for purchase, soona edits and delivers the final product within 24 hours.
RESEARCHING THE PROBLEM SPACE
To get a baseline of the shared market space that soona operates within, I reviewed similar digital content creation companies. The criteria for this competitive audit included comparisons of the features, functionality, hierarchy, and process flows.
During the stakeholder interview, soona CCO Haley Anderson explained through the particular areas where they noticed customers drop off during the booking and shoot process, along with the common questions her staff would frequently get from confused new customers. soona prides itself on being a friendly, accessible, and inclusive photo/video company, one that removes the traditional layer of snobbery and pretentiousness in this space. Their overall tone is one of love, dependability, and quirkiness, and they want to ensure that their web application upholds these same values.
JOURNEY MAPPING
Knowing more about the competitive landscape and now soona itself, I started to notice areas where soona was differentiating in ways that positively strengthened their brand, but also other areas where they were differentiating that might be hindering their success.
Keeping all of this research fresh in mind, I took what I’d absorbed thus far and created a user journey map for a hypothetical first-time customer. This model provided a helpful external visualization of a customer’s arc of involvement with soona, bringing to light different levels of pain points and also giving me a sense for where I might prioritize my next steps to best help soona.
soona User Journey Map
WIREFRAMING & DEVELOPER SCOPING
Guided by these insights around positives and pain points from the journey map, my design team wireframed 100+ low-fidelity prototypes. We invited a soona developer to scope these prototypes to share their development time estimate (40 hours) and feasibility for each feature.
KANO MODEL ANALYSIS
Based on the developer scoping session, the team selected 10 designs via dot voting to include in a user testing survey. Once complete, we analyzed these responses using the Kano model to evaluate the degree to which users were satisfied or dissatisfied with a feature along with its level of importance. These results provided valuable insights as to which features would be most beneficial for users in closing the existing gaps in the process flow.
RAMPING UP FOR RAPID PROTOTYPING
Considering the needs of the soona stakeholder, their developer, and now the insights from customers, I was ready to dive in and prototyping a combination of solutions that struck a healthy balance across the board: reflective of soona’s values and goals, provided impactful and necessary changes for customers, and realistic within the allotted development budget. To that end, the following annotated wireframes demonstrate my recommendations for soona.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Due to the hours budgeted for these new features, these designs needed to maximize correction in a limited amount of time. In these wireframes, I worked to leverage soona’s existing assets and layout to create a variety of features across the booking and shooting process, ranging from simple (such as a branded progress bar, revising interface language to fit customer mental models, and adding example photos in context to support new user understanding) to more complex (creating a more visual “shotlist” selection page, differentiating between raw and edited photos with a live editing feature, and calling unsure users to action with “Staff Favorites” feature).