Role
UX/UI Designer
Team
Concept Project
Duration
3 Months
Company
Naie
Problem
Booking salon appointments is still a frustrating experience for both customers and salon owners. Most local salons rely on WhatsApp messages, manual scheduling, or outdated systems that create long waiting times, missed appointments, unclear slot availability, and chaotic communication. Customers struggle to discover good salons nearby, while salon owners face difficulty managing bookings, staff schedules, customer history, and real-time availability efficiently.
Before
The salon booking experience often feels fragmented and unreliable. Customers usually need to message salons manually, wait for responses, or deal with unclear availability and rescheduling issues. Salon owners manage appointments through calls, spreadsheets, or chats, making operations difficult to organize and scale. Existing solutions also lack a premium and modern user experience, especially for younger users who expect fast and seamless digital interactions.
What I Did
Designed Naie as a modern appointment booking platform focused on simplifying salon discovery, reducing waiting time, and creating a smoother scheduling experience for both customers and salon owners. The platform combines premium UX, hyperlocal discovery, and real-time booking management into a minimal and easy-to-use experience.
• Defined the complete product UX and booking workflows
• Designed separate experiences for customers and salon owners
• Created a streamlined live slot booking system
• Designed real-time availability and queue tracking flows
• Built service and staff selection experiences
• Designed appointment rescheduling and reminder workflows
• Created a hyperlocal salon discovery experience
• Designed an owner dashboard for appointment and staff management
• Structured customer history and loyalty system experiences
• Built modern onboarding flows for both customers and salon owners
• Reduced booking friction by simplifying unnecessary steps
• Created a minimal, premium, and Gen Z–friendly visual system
After
Naie transforms salon booking into a faster and more organized experience. Customers can discover nearby salons, check live availability, select services and staff, and book appointments with minimal effort. Salon owners get a cleaner way to manage schedules, customer flow, reminders, and operations through a modern dashboard designed for everyday usability.
Business Value
The platform helps reduce waiting times, missed appointments, and manual communication overhead for local salons while improving the overall customer experience. By combining premium UX with operational simplicity, Naie creates a more modern and scalable booking experience for both salon businesses and their customers.
Mistake
In the beginning, I focused more on booking flow and waiting reduction without fully considering unpredictable real-world situations like delayed arrivals and schedule shifting.
I initially underestimated how important trust-building features would be for both salon owners and customers.
Early concepts assumed users would strictly follow scheduled timings, but real behavior turned out to be much less predictable.
I had to rethink parts of the experience later to better handle dynamic queue changes and live schedule adjustments.
I also realized that appointment systems cannot rely only on fixed logic — they need flexibility for real-time operational changes.
Learning
I learned that reducing waiting time is not just a scheduling problem — it is also a trust and communication problem between customers and salon owners.
I understood how important real-time updates and notifications are in helping users feel confident that the system is actively managing their appointment.
This project taught me how small delays can create a chain reaction in appointment-based systems, so queue management needs to be flexible instead of static.
I learned how to think through real-world behavioral scenarios, like customers arriving late or requesting quicker services unexpectedly.
I also understood that service-based products need to balance both business efficiency and customer convenience at the same time.
Future State
Naie is designed as a scalable local-service booking ecosystem that can expand beyond salons into other appointment-based businesses. Future opportunities include smart scheduling, AI-powered recommendations, loyalty systems, analytics, and deeper business management tools while maintaining a fast, minimal, and premium experience.
Detailed plan
Optimizing Salon Appointments for Seamless User Experience and Time Savings
What is Naie?
Naie is a salon appointment scheduling app designed to save users time by reducing the wait typically experienced at salons. It allows users to book appointments in advance, streamlining the process and ensuring a more efficient experience by minimizing the time spent waiting for their turn. The app aims to enhance customer satisfaction by offering a convenient, user-friendly platform for managing salon visits.
The Vision
Naie aims to evolve from a simple appointment scheduling app to a comprehensive platform for enhancing the salon experience.
The vision is to create an ecosystem where users can seamlessly book appointments, explore salon services, and access personalized grooming recommendations, ultimately fostering a community centered around beauty and self-care.
What is Problem
Salon customers often face long wait times and inconvenient scheduling due to unorganized appointment management, leading to wasted time and inconsistent experiences.
Long wait times at salons
Customers experience long waiting periods due to unpredictable foot traffic and the absence of a proper scheduling tool. This wastes time and frustrates users, particularly those with busy lifestyles who need quick services.
Inefficient appointment management
Salons face difficulty managing both walk-ins and scheduled appointments, leading to peak-hour overcrowding and underuse during slow periods. This creates stress for both customers and staff, impacting overall efficiency.
Lack of Appointment Transparency
Users have no way of knowing available time slots at salons, forcing them to visit without any information about wait times. This lack of clarity complicates planning and often leads to an unsatisfactory experience.
Inconsistent Customer Experience
Without an organized scheduling system, customers' experiences vary greatly depending on salon traffic, which can lead to dissatisfaction and a reluctance to return to the same salon.
Project brief
How might we reduce wait times and improve the salon experience for users by creating a system where customers can easily schedule appointments and salons can efficiently manage their operations?
Bussiness perspective
It will help salons efficiently manage customer appointments by offering better visibility into available time slots and reducing overbookings. This will improve customer satisfaction, leading to increased client retention and loyalty
Expectation
As the sole designer, I was responsible for:
Rather than delivering a fully developed app, the primary focus was on creating a functional prototype that could demonstrate the app’s potential to salon owners and users while convincing leadership and stakeholders of its value in optimizing the salon experience.
Project timeline
The project timeline focused on gathering continuous feedback from stakeholders while ensuring the concept aligned with the product's goals and vision. As the sole designer, instead of prioritizing rapid delivery, I emphasized building a strong foundation that could support future development and growth.
Research
I began by thoroughly exploring the salon industry, focusing on both the customer experience and how salons manage appointments. This involved studying existing salon scheduling apps and similar service platforms to understand how they operate and what gaps Naie could fill to enhance the overall salon appointment ecosystem.
I worked closely with salon owners and staff who had an in-depth understanding of day-to-day operations to ensure I grasped all aspects of appointment management, customer interactions, and salon services. This helped me design a solution that would seamlessly integrate into their existing workflows.
I engaged closely with salon professionals who had a deep understanding of customer management and appointment scheduling to ensure I fully comprehended all the necessary features and services Naie needed to offer for both users and salon owners.
User segmentation
This research provided me with a solid understanding of the product strategy for Naie, but to make it complete, I needed insights from different user segments. I segmented Naie's users into two primary groups: salon customers, who are looking for a time-efficient and seamless booking experience, and salon owners, who need an intuitive appointment management system to optimize their daily operations and customer flow. These perspectives were crucial in shaping the final product design.
This insight helped shape our strategy to engage all user segments, ensuring that salon customers remain connected with Naie even after their immediate need of booking an appointment is met. Features like personalized service recommendations and appointment reminders were designed to maintain long-term user engagement.
Key takeaways from this understanding informed my next steps in secondary research.
Secondary research
I focused on exploring how competitors and similar salon booking platforms addressed user engagement and retention challenges. This included analyzing features like loyalty programs, personalized offers, and seamless booking experiences to understand how Naie could differentiate itself and keep users consistently engaged.
I also aimed to identify best practices and strategies for integrating gamification into Naie’s platform to enhance user engagement. This included exploring reward systems, appointment streaks, and loyalty programs that could resonate with both existing users and new customers, encouraging them to return and interact with the app more frequently.
Journey mapping
User flow for appointment booking
Information architecture (IA)
Low-fidility
High-fidility
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