Designing an app for a startup in New York
About the product
The Hive is an on-demand injectable service platform based in New York, US, it’s an app that lets users sign up and find practitioners nearby to do facial treatments at the ease of their home. The Hive solves many day-to-day problems faced by practitioners and patients like booking a treatment, finding the right practitioner, having an office space, storing medical products etc. As the Hive founder reached out to us, we immediately took this as an opportunity to explore our skills in designing a fully-fledged app that consisted of various complex flows. The client wanted the app to have a modern user interface with a very seamless user flow.
Research Phase
Our startup mindset said that we could design this app all by ourselves. A little too soon we realised that we needed additional help from industry experts so we partnered up with Code94 Labs who had a great understanding in developing complex apps. After the client interviews, we onboarded the client as usual and started with the sketches. Midway through the sketches, we figured that this is more complex than we expected so we went back to the research phase to get to know more about the product. The client wanted an app where the user can onboard, get a consultation done through an AR model, book a practitioner and get the service done at the ease of their home. This was the flow in a nutshell but digging deeper we found that several departments were involved like the pharmacy, delivery, Hive admin, and the practitioner. Few of the major problems we faced were
- Coming up with an alternative method to replace the AR model,
- Keeping the pharmaceutical products safe
- Practitioner arriving after the product has been delivered
The solution we came up with after countless hours of research were
- Add a manual consultation to replace the AR model which included a separate booking flow
- Delivering the pharmaceutical products 24 hours prior to practitioner’s arrival
- Practitioners can be booked only after 24 hours
Designing Phase
It took us almost a week to understand this product and to figure out exactly how to put everything in place. After this point, we went on to finish the wireframes and we moved on to the UI design. The client expected a honeycomb design with minimal color selection. We came up with an elegant color palette that portrayed the brand’s bold vision. It took us almost 3 weeks to finish this 100 plus screens app which included user, practitioner, and pharmacy apps.
Key Takeaway
The client was very pleased with the end product and how it flowed thoroughly. The minimalistic design gave the user an unmatchable experience. The major takeaway from this project for us was that product research is a key component in product design, spending more time researching about the product and how users are going to interact with it can save a lot more time than going back and forth.