image of Dayslice's new home page design
Helping service businesses manage their daily workflow with ease.

Dayslice is a SaaS platform where service businesses can handle bookings, payments, and marketing.

In the span of 8 weeks, I led design, research, workshops, and worked with multiple teams to align on visual direction, product strategy, and technical implementation. I designed new UI and branding components and redesigned our marketing website.

The new homepage served a new foundation for streamlining our user's business operations and putting it at the forefront which was previously lacking.

responsiBilities

UI/UX Design, Visual Design, Product Design, Product Strategy

TEAM

3 Engineers
1 Head of Marketing
1 Customer Success
1 CEO/Product Manager

the challenge

Users were dropping off the homepage

We experienced a good chunk of users dropping off immediately upon entering the product. Through user calls and existing research, we learned that there were multiple factors.

snippet of the former home page that had issuesImage displays information about the issues we were experiencing in our product: product value not fully communicated, features were lacking discoverability, lack of product differentiation, didn't fully address the needs of our users

The homepage failed to clearly communicate our product’s value, a few features lacked discoverability, lacked differentiation from competitors, and didn’t address the needs of our users' diverse use cases.

💭

How might we reposition our home page to increase product value for users?

the approach

Problem discovery

Given our limited resources in time, budget, and interested users, we didn’t have a lot of opportunities for extensive user research. So I did the following to gather as much relevant information as I can into the problem space:

  • Consulted with Customer Success to identify user pain points with the current product
  • Reviewed existing user data, competitor analysis, and performed a card-sorting exercise with team

The more information I gathered about our users and competitors, the more I was able to identify opportunities and weaknesses along the customer journey of our product experience. We needed to surface the features that provide value to our users that other competitors don't offer, and we needed to define our users' values and how that translates to business impact. Upon finding new discoveries and insights from research, workshopping, and stakeholder reviews, I kept on refining the solution until it was validated with users during testing.

Define and ideate

After gathering the research findings, I applied a myriad of specific UX methods to help me think of proper solutions for our defined user types and product use cases.

I created an updated customer journey map to pinpoint key opportunities for improvements depending on the user's stage.

I explored various layouts to address the information hierarchy and usability needs. I needed to overcome design challenges and trade-offs of balancing between visual appeal, usability, and functionality.

Preparing for testing

After reviewing with the team, I designed and prepared 4 key mockups for testing with 5 active users to validate our assumptions.

Key feedback:
  • Users preferred a list view of bookings because it felt more streamlined and easier to parse through
  • Alternative layouts like the 2-Column view increased cognitive load so it was omitted

the final design

Ready for handoff!

It was time to deliver the results to engineering and have the final discussion on the implementation. It took numerous iterations and reviews with the whole team, but we ensured that we were aligned on the visual direction, product positioning, and technical feasibility.

the impact

  • Through several user feedback and LogRocket (a product analytics tool), we found that...
  • A majority of users found the new UI easy to navigate
  • We experienced at least a 30% increase in feature discoverability and usage
  • We provided clearer communication of value that set us apart from competitors
shows metrics: 90% or more of users had easy navigation with the new design. 30% increase in engagement, discoverability, and usage rates of features.

REFLECTION

Overcoming challenging obstacles

This project required deep understanding of mental models, information hierarchy, balance of visual elements, and user needs and goals. It took time to figure out the best solution for our users with our limited resources, but it helped me understand more complex nuances of design in general.

What I need to do moving forward
Establish clear success metrics from the start

We didn't have these metrics to figure out how we'd evaluate the success of this project. What I should've done was create clear KPIs to benchmark future projects.

Addressing the UI more intentionally

I realize my use of colors and styling in fonts, buttons, and components felt too overbearing and I didn't have the principle of 'less is more' in mind.

Advocate for more comprehensive user research

Researching the problem space was largely based on existing user research and data, but it would've brought more clarity if I had the chance to discover deeper roots of the problem through intentional user interviews. This would've helped refine our product strategy as well.

Thanks for viewing!

snippet of a data dashboard in our product.