Mel Therapie

Overview

Mel Therapie is a mobile massage company serving the Greater Montreal area. The business has been operating successfully for many years without a website or social media presence. Recently, the company decided to expand its customer base and reach new potential clients by creating a website and enhancing its online presence. I have been tasked with designing and building a bilingual website from scratch to showcase all of the company's services and provide new clients with a way to contact and inquire about the company.

Goals

The goal of this mandate is to design and build a website that provides both new and existing users with service information and a contact method to inquire about or ideally book a therapy session. Copywriting, SEO, and imagery will also be provided alongside the design and development.

Role

UX/web designer • Copywriter • SEO

Ideation, UX research, UI design, wireframing, prototyping, web development/building in Webflow, copywriting, photography, light SEO

Scope

3 months

Tools

Figma, Webflow, Photoshop, Canva, pen & paper

Year

2024

Meet the persona: Claire Boucher

When discussing the persona with the company owner, it was clear there was no particular target market, and the company was looking to reach anyone they could. However, there were some characteristics that stood out enough to create a persona.

Claire is a married 53-year-old mother of two adult children, who are no longer living at home. Claire works in administration at an office all day and when she gets home, she likes to relax with her hobbies, but more recently she has become intrigued with the idea of getting at-home massages for her and her husband every couple of weeks. Claire lives in Montreal and has a large bilingual community of friends. When she finds a good service, she likes to share the news with everyone she knows.

Age

53 years old

Education

Bachelor of Administration

Status

Married

Occupation

Administration

Location

Montreal

Tech literacy

Intermediate

Personality traits

Extrovert, confident, cautious spender, curious

Frustrations

Doesn't know where to look to find at-home massage therapy.
Apprehensive about having a stranger enter their home.
Worries that scheduling will be a problem in booking.
Not sure that the style of massage she wants can be done at home.

Core needs

Wants to feel comfortable with her massage therapist.
Her husband only speaks French, so bilingualism is preferred.
Looking for an easy way to schedule her massages.
Wants a service she can brag to her friends about and potentially refer.

Pain Points

Finding a therapist

Mel therapie has never been properly online before now, which means that any new potential customers that don't come from referrals from pre-existing customers are few and far between. This website has been designed with findabilityin mind. Light SEO, in the form of keywords and proper building strategies have been implemented in order to help with Google rankings. The website will also be able to be linked to social media ads which would more than likely land on Claire's feed.

Scheduling

Ideally the website would include an option to schedule their massage directly within the website with no need to contact or speak to any other party. However, the owner of Mel Therapie was not comfortable with that idea because she could not guarantee that open availabilities in the web app were always accurate. Therefore, as an alternative, in the contact sheet, we have given the user the option to suggest a day and time they would like to have services rendered. The company will then confirm via email.

Trusting a therapist

At-home massage can be a pretty vulnerable position to be put in, a stranger in your home, touching you with minimal coverings can be daunting. We have made sure to include a picture and biography (with credentials) of the Mel Therapie therapist to help potential customers feel more at ease.

Massage variety

Claire is not familiar with what kind of limitations there are when using an at-home therapy service. Claire and her husband are looking for different massage styles and aren't sure what is available or feasible. A dedicated service list has been created to provide users with a complete list of services and descriptions.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis was performed involving both direct and indirect competitors serving the Montreal area. Some of these competitors had a large team of at-home mobile massage therapists, while others had one therapist. Some of the competitors offered at-home massage and others did not.

Findings:

Online booking and scheduling are a popular booking method amongst similar competitors; however, these companies are much larger and have multiple therapists which makes blind booking easier to accomplish. Mel Therapie has a single therapist and would prove more difficult.
Gift cards are popular with all competitor types and should be also considered in the future.
Small to medium sized massage companies all offer reviews on their website, large businesses do not (although they have Google reviews), focusing on Google reviews may be more advantageous.
Good and available pricing is an opportunity for Mel Therapie to set itself apart from the competition.
All competitors mention therapist credentials.

User Testing

User testing was conducted in person with three different participants.

Participants were asked to complete the following tasks

Learn about the therapist.
Think of a massage style they would like, find out if it's available and read the description.
Book a massage.

Findings

Users were pleased with the credentials mentioned in the biography on the home page, it made them feel at ease with the service.
Finding the service page was not difficult, however, users complained that the page was too long and scrolling through it was tiring.
1. We adjusted the design to include clickable tabs at the top of the service page which scroll the user to whichever service tab they clicked.
2. A "scroll-to-top" button was also added so user could scroll back to the top of the service list.
The original designs had a calendar displaying available slot times to book a massage; however, they could not be booked immediately on the website, an email would still have to be sent to the company to confirm. This unfortunately confused some users, caused frustration, some believed the booking mechanism may have been broken and quit.
1. The calendar displaying available slots was removed as it caused more issues than necessary for the user.
2. Rather, fields in the contact form were created which would allow the user to tentatively request certain dates and times.

High-Fidelity Wireframes

The final designs were able to provide solutions to the issues and needs of the user, based on the mandate's persona. Although there were some limitations to what was feasible for the company, the designs were successful in achieving their goals.

Home Page

The home page will be a useful landing page when utilizing Google and Facebook ads. All subjects are touched upon on the home page including the therapist's biography, a description of what at-home-massage is, as well as a quick view list of all the massage styles available.

Service Page

The service page provides users with a list of all therapy styles available, alongside their descriptions and photo. Users can use the tabs and the scroll-to-top button to maneuver easily around the page. At any time in the process the user can click the "book" button in the navbar to contact the company and book a service.

Contact page

When the "book" button in the top nav bar is clicked by the user will be directed to this page. The user will be able to see general times and days available at the top, and they will be able to write a message and tentatively request therapy, date, time. Mel Therapie, will get back to them within 24 hours to confirm or suggest another date and time.

Building in Webflow

Once the design was complete, I continued on to build the design out in Webflow both in English and French. All copy and imagery were provided by me and approved by the owner of Mel Therapie. You can view the live site in the link below.

MEL THERAPIE LIVE SITE