Soul Imagez is a family-run tattoo studio based in the Bay Area. For this project, I worked with them to redesign their website.

Role: Solo project working with a Client 

Tools:  Figma, InVision, Pen & paper

Platform: Website Redesign 

Timeline: 4 weeks

Background

The owners of Soul Imagez believed that revamping their website will lead to client conversion and overall enhanced brand visibility. 

After having a lot of discussions with the stakeholders, we agreed that the relevant metric for this kind of question is the conversion rate, which measures the percentage of users who complete a desired action - in this case request a consultation. 

Discovering the Problem ⁉️

After my initial discussion with the Soul Imagez team, I set out to learn as much as possible about the client experience with a few research goals in mind:

1. What is the current experience of using the site like?

2. What is the market like and competitors doing and what

3. What challenges and motivations do clients have?

Let’s take a look at Soul Imagez’s current website 📍

Before talking to clients, it was important to first become familiar with Soul Imagez’s current website experience. This allowed me to not only note down any initial impressions or usability concerns I had but also identify parts of the process I wanted to learn more about.

Next, I analyzed competitors 👀

With so many tattoo shops in the bay area to choose from, I wanted to analyze what was working and what wasn’t and see what I could learn. I looked at a few popular ones and some up-and-coming ones to see if they were taking a different approach.

A competitive analysis showed the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor and what type of content was included on competitor websites. My goal was to compare and identify common features across these sites and potential opportunities for Soul Imagez to differentiate itself. 

Soul Imagez was missing important pages like an FAQ, Artist profile page, and price estimates that competitors had on their site.

Who are Soul Imagez’s target clients?

Understanding Users 💉🖤

Before conducting user research, I had a call with the owners of Soul Imagez to understand who their primary clients were. From our discussion, it looked like there were two distinct groups of clients for Soul Imagez.

1. Clients that have gotten a tattoo before and were looking for a studio to get their next piece done. They usually knew what they wanted and worked with the studio to get their piece customized to their preferences. 

2. Clients who have never gotten a tattoo before and needed more hand-holding/ guidance.

I heard from the clients themselves!

I decided to recruit interview participants two different ways: 

1. I reached out to some of Soul Imagez’s past clients through their Yelp page and asked if they would be open to being interviewed about their experience.  Their data was helpful but inherently biased. 

2. I also reached out to friends and family that have either gotten a tattoo (not at Soul Imagez) or are planning on getting a tattoo. 

I wanted to make sure I got a broad range of participants so that I could gather a holistic set of data and reduce bias. I ended up conducting 6 interviews. Throughout the interviews, I had asked participants to also explore Soul Imagez’s current website to keep it interactive and test reactions to the website. 

Key Takeaways

1. Past clients didn’t know the site existed or elected not to use it. They called or emailed the studio to request a consultation.

   “I think having an online form would just make it easier to contact the studio and they can get back to me via email.”

2. Users had specific criteria on what they would like to see on a tattoo website.

   “I want to be able to learn about the tattoo artist, their specialty if they have one, and the ballpark rate they charge.”

3. Users were interested in features that made it easy for them to communicate their designs to the tattoo artist.

   “It would be nice to see how my tattoo could look like and then send it to the tattoo artist.”

Key design opportunities start to arise…

Through the synthesis of all the data gathered, I realized that prospective clients wanted a more seamless, intuitive experience and Soul Imagez struggled to provide that experience in their current website.

…which helped me hone in on the problem spaces I wanted to focus on.

How might we create a more inviting and pleasant tattoo studio search experience for clients?

Prior to beginning the design, I spent time looking through Soul Imagez’s current website, noting the colors, language, and typography to ensure the experience I was proposing fit in seamlessly with the current experience. 

I did this by: 

1. Enhancing the UI to incorporate more colors, rounded corners, and an overall more welcoming feel.

   I pulled colors from the existing and emphasized illustrations and imagery based - aiming for a more visual look that highlighted the tattoo imagery.

2. Breaking up the task flow

The current experience presents all the information on a single page which can feel overwhelming. I decided to break this up both visually and experimentally to allow more breathing room and focused engagement on specific sections.

How might we make the experience of requesting a consultation more efficient and delightful for clients? 

Requesting a consultation was the main metric that determined the conversion rate of users who landed on Soul Imagez site. It was important that we made this action easy for users to find and perform. 

I did this by: 

1. Creating various touchpoints for users to request a consultation.
   

   By incorporating various instances for requesting a consultation, the user is able to easily perform the action. It also motivates the user to perform the action and allows them to advance in their search journey. 

2. Making the consultation form straightforward and easy to fill out.

How might we empower clients by providing them with all the information they would need to know? 

Prospective clients wanted to know specific information about the artist before they decided to contact the studio. Most of the users I talked to during research indicated that having transparency into this information allowed them to have a better understanding of the studio and helped them make a more informed decision. I wanted to make sure that the Soul Imagez site empowered them with the details they need.

I did this by: 

1. Creating an artist profile page that clearly shows the artist’s specialties, rates, a gallery of their work, and reviews left by past clients.  

2. Creating a detailed FAQ page and Aftercare Instructions page.

How might we help clients communicate their designs to the tattoo artist? 

An interesting takeaway from the research was that a lot of users wanted to be able to visualize their tattoo and see how it looks.

What if we give users a way to see how their tattoo looks?   

This is where the idea for the Editing tool came in. I wanted to bring in this feature as a unique value adds to the Soul Imagez website. Something that would delight the users and be extremely useful for them during the tattoo design/application process. 

How could it add value?

The editing tool allows the user to customize their design to their liking. Once they’re happy with their design, they have the option to export the image and attach it to the consultation form to then send it to their artist. Most tattoo websites ask for a description of that tattoo which is hard to represent with words. This tool allows the user to visually communicate their designs to the tattoo artist.

Early Iteration

When I brought this idea to the owners of Soul Imagez they immediately told me that although it seemed like a cool idea, they weren't sure if they could feasibly implement the feature with the budget they had. They still encouraged me to flesh out the high fidelity designs and were curious to see how it could possibly look.

Usability Testing

I decided to run some usability testing sessions on some of the early designs of the tool with some friends who have gotten tattoos before to validate my hypothesis and confirm the value of this feature.

Usability Test Findings

The main feedback I got from the sessions were: 

1. The editing tool is confusing. It’s not clear what can be edited - the body part image, the tattoo image, or both. 

2. Users were expecting there to have an option to export the image from the tool and send it to the tattoo studio. 

3. Some of the editing options seem unnecessary and don’t make sense. 

After incorporating feedback from testing sessions, I arrived at the final designs for the editing tool below.

Second Iteration

Introducing Soul Imagez’s new and improved website!

Looking back and moving forward 

Overall, this project was exciting since it was my first client project. Throughout this project, I learned many lessons:

Talk to everyone 🗣

Especially in a situation like this, where we didn’t have much time to get acquainted with the company and the product, our early conversations with the whole team proved invaluable.  Understanding budget constraints and the goals of the founders was paramount to making informed and business-driven choices. Working with an actual client gave me more experience with explaining, and at times, defending my design decisions—an important aspect of being a designer.

Test & validate early and often 💻

With this project, I realized how important it is to test early and often in order to validate certain hypotheses. In the case of the editing tool, although the founders weren’t sure if they could realistically implement it, they appreciated the insights from testing sessions and still wanted to have the option to implement the designs in the future. 

Moving forward with the designs 🔜

As of right now, Soul Imagez is still deciding when the right time to implement these designs would be. With the outbreak of COVID, understandably some of their priorities have shifted. If they continue to move forward with the designs I would love to work with the developers to understand the engineering constraints and the feasibility of the designs.