Mysseur

Although having a professional Massage Therapist with many years of experience in our multidisciplinary Team of Co-Founders, there was still a lot that we didn’t know and even things that we didn’t know we needed to know!

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To tackle this challenge and gather all the necessary information we carried out research on two main protagonists of the platform:
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Massage Therapists:

• What tasks and subtasks do they have to do in order to manage their daily business?
• Which resources and tools do they use?
• How do they find clients?
• How do they manage pricing and billing?
• How do the schedule appointments?
• Where do they work with their clients?
• How do they find workspaces, if needed?
• What massage style do they offer?
• Which challenges do they face?
• What are their goals and motivation?
• Which activities are most important to them?
• How should a perfect service system work in order to support them as much as possible?‍

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Massage Clients:

• What tasks and subtasks do they have to do in order to book and receive a massage?
• What is their motivation for having a massage?
• What massage styles do they prefer?
• How do they find the “right” massage therapist?
• Where do they prefer to receive a massage?
• What are reasonable prices for a massage and why?
• What does the perfect massage look like?

Beside the lack of information regarding our potential user groups, we also had one other challenge which was not to be underestimated. Despite sharing a common vision of bringing the perfect massage therapist to the client, we still did not have any venture capital to back us up. Having only our savings, money was always an issue and so it was vital to plan all business- and product design activities as lean as possible.

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In order to have a solid starting point for our team and to plan out further human-centered design activities, I gathered all the existing information and assumptions about our users and put it into more visual and interpretable forms like User Group Profiles, Proto-Personas and Proto-User Journeys.

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Before starting with the actual User Research, I first wanted to learn more about our competitors and the current market we were planning to operate in. I decided to do Competitor Research to find out what challenges our competitors faced and how they tackled those challenges.

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From that point on, it was much easier for us to identify what we didn’t already know in order to explore it in further user research. To find out more about the context of use for both sides, I decided to interview the therapists as well as the clients. We also tried to do a Diary Study with the Therapists but noticed that this is might be too much work for them.

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After interviewing several therapists and clients, we had enough insights to improve or complete our existing Proto-Personas and Proto-User Journeys. All the information we gathered about the context of use helped us to identify user needs and to reality check our assumptions.

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From there we were able to derive and structure user requirements and finally start designing solutions in the form of user flows, wireframes, paper prototypes and low-fidelity prototypes.

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In order to make sure that we were building the right things, we decided to reality-check our existing design solutions and ran a few simple usability tests before going into building high-fidelity prototypes.