The Quest Of Getting People To Love Themselves
Bali is home to more than a thousand Spas and wellness centers. But do you believe when we say 90% of them are still operating with pen and paper? And excel sheet is their definition of state of the art operational software. Therefore, you have to call a spa and talk to a real human being to make a booking. Is this 2019 or the stone age?
The guys from Spa Ninja is set to change that, and we’re on board to help them doing so.
Ideation and Research
Spa Ninja is a wellness platform company based in Singapore but focused on Bali market. They have this vision to encourage self-love by demystifying and making wellness services accessible to everyone.
Self love is a big word, and big things need to start from small steps. So that’s exactly what we did.
We assisted the team to first break down the problem into smaller chunks, by identifying the type of users they want to serve, imagine their ideal user journey, and finally deriving features to develop for each user type.
We came up with three main user types:
1. Wellness operator – Spa, hotel, gym, salon, or anything that offers wellness services.
2. Wellness customer – consumer of the wellness services.
3. Booking agents / reseller – travel agent, independent tour guide, blogger and social media influencers. Basically anyone that can earn commission by recommending certain wellness services to end consumers.
As Spa Ninja already have a fully functioning SAAS product for the wellness operators used by hundreds of Spas in Bali, they decided to focus on the second user type, the Wellness customer.
We helped the team to ideate and map out the complete customer journey, and derive list of features from this. At the end of this session, one of the co-founder came up with the name Yosiwa.
Yosiwa is what they decided to call the consumer-facing interface of Spa Ninja. Basically it is the booking platform where users can browse for wellness services and book them in real time. According to the co-founder who coined the name, Yosiwa is actually an acronym of Your Smart Interactive Wellness Assistant. Surprise.. surprise..
We then started gathering insights from Yosiwa’s potential users. We interviewed handfuls of spa-goers in Bali, locals and tourists. We validated the user journey and the exhaustive lists of features we came up with during the ideation phase.
Synthesise
After two weeks of foundational and explorative research, these are some of the findings:
1. As Bali is a major tourism destination, most of the users would be tourists.
2. In physical wellness treatment like spa or massage, the therapist’s gender is an important decision factor.
3. As most users are on holiday, they are less sensitive of time constraints.
4. Other than wellness treatments like spa or salon, users are also looking for ways to book gym classes and workshops.
First finding led to the decision to develop Yosiwa as a progressive web apps instead of a native app. It eliminates the hassle of having to download yet another app to use only during a short period of time.
We previously assumed that real-time booking and on-time services to be of utmost importance to users. However, as most are on holiday, this turned out to be invalidated. This finding led the decision to create a feature to book wider arrays of treatments without real-time confirmation.The management team also decided to go forward with developing features to book classes or workshops.
On the design concept, we try to make the customer feel like they are being taken care of throughout the entire journey even before using our service (doing the spa, yoga, etc). Aligned with the Spa Ninja philosophy, we decided to portray Yosiwa as a ninja character that assists and takes care of customer’s need throughout their wellness journey via the app.
Production
So after three major iterations over four months of development time, Yosiwa finally came to life.
Here’s how he looks like.
After few rounds of internal tests, we finally brought our first working product for real users to test in February 2020.
The main modules we released in this phase are:
1. Spa Treatment module, containing onsite wellness treatments like massage, manicure, pedicure.
2. Class module, used to reserve slots in gym classes, yoga course, online classes and workshops.
3. Relaxation ideas module, which is a curated list of wellness and relaxation articles.
Testing the Water
We managed to gather few user feedback post Yosiwa launch, and coupled with few promos the marketing team threw, Yosiwa managed to get couple of dozens daily bookings.
Within this period, the Spa (independent and hotel-operated) signed up to use Yosiwa grew to almost 200, from a modest start of 30.
Moving Forward and Retrospective
Two weeks after we did a limited release on Yosiwa, the Bali tourism industry is hit with Covid-19. All spas and hotels are forced to close down, and social distancing is applied to ensure safety measure. This situation puts Yosiwa on hold since the business model highly relies on spa and hospitality. But this isn’t the end of Yosiwa.
In March 2020, Agency of Things helped Yosiwa to re-work on their business model and product strategy. How did we do it? Through conducting an extensive remote ideations workshops with all the stakeholders, clients and friends from the hospitality industry. Through the workshop, we manage to gather more than 100 feature-related ideas to explore and prioritise. Those features were immediately developed based on priority and impact on revenue.
Stay tuned for the details on how we conducted the workshop! We’ll elaborate the process on another post.