Hire Beauty: Designing a portfolio and networking app
An overview of my design process during a 3 week design sprint creating a mobile app, Hire Beauty.
To design an industry specific platform where beauty professionals can showcase their work and connect with potential employers and fellow industry peers.
Hire Beauty is the #1 job platform for beauty professionals. They connect employers to beauty pros looking for full-time, part-time, freelance jobs and available salon booth rentals.
Figma, Adobe Illustrator
UI Designer
3 Interviews
13 Online Surveys
2 Personas
1 Competitive Analysis
To start of our design sprint, the design team needed to conduct some research to understand who Hire Beauty’s users are or will be. Lead by the UX team, Zak Herbert and Sang Eun (Cindy) Lee, we compiled a list of questions to send off to beauty professionals and employers looking to hire beauty pros. Some of the questions that we asked were:
Some of the responses to these questions were:
The UX Designers gathered the data from our research and created two user personas.
While the UX team was designing the low and mid fidelity screens, I went ahead on my UI process and created an inception sheet.
We want the beauty pros who use this app to feel empowered, creative, inspired and social. We also want the design to embrace the feminine, soft and attractive side of the beauty industry. To reflect this mood, we want the design to have a pastel and soft palette, with a clean, white and open space.
To help invoke the mood and design language from the inception sheet, I created 4 mood boards to show to our client. A mood board is an arrangement of images, materials, pieces of text, etc. intended to evoke or project a particular style or concept. Out of the 4, Hire Beauty decided to go with a mixture of two of them. The first is called Soft and Chic. With this mood board, I took a pastel colour palette from an unchosen mood board and muted the colours to still embrace the softness pastels have yet gaining a professional look. Adding a rose gold creates a delicate mood. The overall look I wanted to achieve with this board was to be soft, delicate, inspiring, and feminine.
The second mood board, Sophisticated Manhattan, used imagery of confident people, to portray an empowering feeling. I also used bold black and white to complement the imagery and for a timeless look. I used images of high end makeup, to reflect an upscale and professional product. The overall mood I was going for in this board is sophistication, empowerment, timelessness, professional, clean and high quality.
Style Tiles are a design deliverable consisting of fonts, colours and interface elements that communicate the essence of a visual brand for the web. It is when a mood board can be too vague, but a final product is too concrete. I decided to create one for our client to help them visualize what is next to come with the design.
Here, I used a similar muted pastel palette from the Soft and Chic mood board. I used images that are instagram inspired to showcase what a makeup pro’s profile might consist of. I used Pt Serif for the header as a serif font shows a sense of timelessness, professionalism and high quality, invoking the same mood as my Sophisticated Manhattan mood board. Open sans is used for the body text as it is a great web font that can be easily read in small point sizes and mobile screens. Open sans also pairs great with serif typefaces such as pt serif.
I made numerous logo variations for Hire Beauty. For a few, I incorporated a brush, as it were to be a makeup brush. For a few I also used a brush stroke typeface, to mimic that of painting a face. As they were fun to create, it did not encompass the brand as the brand itself was first a job board and should look professional and HR like. Those designs would be better off for a cosmetic company. Here’s a visual journey of my design process while creating Hire Beauty’s logo design.
The client liked the arched accent on the H in Hire, as it represented a “booth rental” which are the chairs salons rent out to makeup artists and hair stylists. They felt it really reflected the purpose of the app. The thin weight of the typeface felt modern and professional. With the request of particular colours from the client, the final design of the logo is below.
Hire Beauty is an app with lots of potential and also lots of ambition. Hire Beauty wants to set itself as something more than just a job board. It wants to be the leading communication platform for people in the beauty industry where beauty pros can not only showcase their work but to also interact with other in the industry. They aim to include tips, tricks and videos in a news feed, and also eventually a one stop shop for people who are looking to hire freelancers. Hire Beauty also aims to allow for freelancers to post their date availabilities which will eventually need to include a scheduling aspect within the app.
We wanted to create all that, however as this was Hire Beauty’s first design sprint of 3 weeks it would have been very difficult or near impossible to flush all these features within the app. Though it was very difficult to say no to the client, we had to prioritize what could be possible for the first design sprint. We did this by using sticky notes and organizing these features into must have, nice to have, and don’t need. As deadlines became closer, the nice to have column grew.
Even though we scaled back on the features for the sprint, we needed a functional product and had to create separate screens and navigations for the beauty professional and the employer as they have different uses and goals for the app. In total we still had a big scope ahead of us but it was an exciting task as it helped me push myself to become a faster designer, without taking shortcuts.
As problems always arise with first design sprints, Hire beauty came across a few. In this case, it was within the business model. In order for us to create a functional product we really needed to understand the structure of the business model, however we did not.
Our design team had multiple conversations with our client, about decisions on a payment plan on the app, who will be paying and how it would be set up, ex: per post or subscription based. We also wanted the employers to have a “free trial or free post” as so they can test out the app but we were in debates on how to do that without giving them permanent access to the data base of skilled beauty professionals. This definitely put a hinder on our timeline as we were set back a few days and couldn’t move forward with designing until we flushed out these questions. This taught us designers to really ask ALL the questions to the clients before starting out the design sprint so these instances could be avoided.
We did come with a solution to the problem by creating a “lite” version of the app to the employer, limiting them to being able to view the beauty professional profiles but blocking the access to messaging them until the employer creates a job post. Payment plan would be first post free, and a fee for each type of job post following.
As I mentioned in feature prioritization, we wanted to create all that is possible for Hire Beauty, however could not do so with the time frame that we had. In the future, for possible design sprints would would love to create, test and make iterations of the following:
Go ahead and have fun with this prototype, many of the links are active. I suggest starting by logging in as a beauty pro, look through the app and then start over and log in as an employer so you can see how both of our users would use Hire Beauty.
To view the Figma prototype click Here.
If you would like to see my other work, please visit my portfolio at www.veesimonyi.com
Hire Beauty: Designing a portfolio and networking app
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