treatwell.com
Writeup is not yet complete / polished
Marketplace
Salon management solution
Point of Sale solution
Our SAAS and Marketplace are 2 completely different products (albeit very tightly integrated) and teams working on them are split between London and Vilnius, so communication was key here - all decisions made within one product had to be compatible with the other. There were also multiple dependencies so we had to start small.
At the beginning of this, we didn’t even have an employee profile functionality, there was only a section referring to it in our web platform, where one could type in their job title and bio when creating an employee entity. We thought that adding it our iOS and Android apps was a good start.
While the project itself was successful, It hasn’t had that much impact on the booking experience just yet. Browsing lookbooks is still only accessible via the web and there are some ways to go to integrating it into salons’ and stylists’ profiles on the marketplace.
This was a highly requested feature by our larger salons with many employees. It’s easy to manage schedules of only a couple of people even without a dedicated scheduling functionality but quickly becomes a nightmare once the team grows.
This feature itself doesn’t seem that difficult until we factor in that everything syncs with the marketplace real-time - creating recurring schedules impacts customers’ bookings and our general slot availability.
First, we had to learn how salons actually work! We visited some larger salons in Vilnius area and talked to them about their schedules. After doing so, we consulted with colleagues in other European markets to make sure that all scenarios are covered.
We've ended up with 3 options:
Weekly schedules
Bi-weekly schedules
Odd/Even days of the month ( popular in Eastern Europe)
From here, it was mostly exploration: where to place it within the product and how it should behave. This took many iterations, but the final result was this:
1 - New team tab. Previously team setup was located within settings. Team & Rota are intertwined and I think it was a good idea to make this more prominent in the product.
2 - Colours: White cells represent a default schedule (same as salon hours), green cells indicate that they’re a part of a custom schedule. Yellow indicates that it’s just a one-time override for that particular day.
3 - Triangles represent the start & end of the schedule.
4 - We’ve decided to show total weekly hours cause some stylists are paid by hours worked. This data is later fed into reports that we generate.
Highly recommend checking out the prototype
A bit buggy but works
After testing sessions with our users, this got a green light and eventually became one of the core features among large beauty salons.
Since the company was relatively large it was important to convey to other departments what we’re working on. A fun way of doing it was making internal release notes after every sprint. Each development team would submit their headline feature for that sprint and we’d vote on them. The winning feature would be headlined in those release notes with an accompanying banner (we stopped doing these once we moved to continuous delivery).
Below are some of my headline banners.
Vytautas Kaleinikas