Treat Street
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Treat Street is an app that encourages you to treat yourself and helps you find time in your busy schedule to do so. The problem is that many of us do not allow time to treat ourselves or even acknowledge or remember that maybe we should. Treat Street solves that by making it easy to find and schedule treats for yourself – it’s like Yelp for treats but with the added value of using your calendar’s availability to sync up and find available appointments or simply nudge you to use your free time for a little pampering every now and then. “Treat Yo Self Day” (popularized by fictional characters Donna Meagle and Tom Haverford in Parks and Rec) doesn’t have to only happen once a year if you sprinkle the treats throughout.
The Process
I invented and developed this app as a personal and student case study in order to conduct a deep dive practice into UX/UI design. The following images and text outlines the ongoing, iterative design process.
User Persona
One of the first steps in my process was to create a User Persona – I came up with Sophia, the “too busy for herself” working mom and kept her in mind as I developed the user experience and UI.
User Flows
Next was the iterative process of developing a user flow.
THE PROBLEM: My first iteration of Treat Street was essentially Yelp or Google for treats. So I spent time pondering and interviewing people about how to add value to my user that went beyond what they could get via Yelp or Google. One suggestion was to focus on the onboarding with customizing preferences. The idea was that the user would set up a number of parameters in order to help customize and/or narrow their treat searching. The first user flow with this idea in mind (not pictured) included multiple onboarding steps and questions that felt much too cumbersome and unnecessary.
The second iteration of this concept is outlined below. Core to this flow was a concern about over-burdening the user or turning them away by asking them to provide personal details and go through too many steps before getting to the core offering of the product. Therefore, I wanted to provide the user access up front and then offer them the ability to customize further while allowing them to skip steps.
THE PROBLEM: The flow still felt too cumbersome and I couldn’t find a true need or value for users to customize their preferences so much for an already narrow search, as compared to Yelp or Google.
Eventually, through further user research, I decided the added value would be a calendar component that allows the user to schedule treats or reminders. Taking the calendar idea even further, I landed on a Calendar Syncing function that would allow (with user authorization/permission) a salon’s booking software to access a user’s available time slots in order to determine if both party’s appointment availability synced up.
Wireframes
Following the user flow, I created low-fidelity wireframes. Here are the final iterations of those.
A/B Testing
Next, I conducted A/B testing for the treat selection screen. The unanimous decision was for the chip selection (Option A) over the check list (Option B).
