The home of experimental hair colour, online.

As with any major redesign, my involvement started with learning as much as I could about Bleach's customers and users. I organised interviews with Bleach employees and hair stylists, and ran field studies in two of their physical salons.

Based on the insights gathered, I categorised and documented the typical behaviours, goals and frustrations associated with DIY hair colouring. A set of four proto-personas was developed and later distilled into specific archetypes with the C-level team, used throughout the project to help launch tailored product sets on the future ecommerce platform.

The COVID-19 pandemic had an unprecedented impact on physical businesses. Some salons had to close temporarily, and stylists were furloughed. The team saw this as an opportunity for stylists to host 1-to-1 consultations with customers using, or interested in, Bleach products at home.

As the existing website didn't have the technical capabilities required, I was tasked with creating a concept for a proprietary live consultation solution. While this version wasn't implemented, it served as the blueprint for the upcoming Bleach online platform.

In addition to 1-to-1 consultations, Bleach decided to host 1-to-many live streams called "Hair Parties", where stylists and celebrities could showcase Bleach products and how to use them at home.

Technically this started as a working prototype, with a simple Admin Panel where admins could create and schedule a Hair Party. Each event generated a Zoom Meeting ID used to broadcast the show on a standalone page, and could be manually started and ended from there.

The Hair Parties were a hit with at-home DIY-dyers, and what started as a quick experiment turned into one of the core services Bleach would offer. Building on this success, I was tasked by the CTO to imagine what a bespoke "Bleach back office" would look like. It would later be used as a combined CRM and CMS for the new Bleach platform.

I drew a comprehensive map of the back office based on the brief, the current website, and upcoming features the team wanted to introduce. We built it mostly from scratch using CoreUI for Vue.js as a base for rapid styling, so Bleach could own the entire end-to-end toolset.

In parallel, I was tasked with exploring what a conversation-led Bleach platform could look like. The brief: imagine an experience where customers land on a live chat and interact with stylists right away.

They could also use this conversational UI (or "CUI") to view past orders, sign up to upcoming Hair Parties & Tutorials, or change their Bleach account settings. I designed concepts and clickable prototypes used as a starting point for upcoming versions of the platform.

After refining the initial concepts and gathering feedback from stakeholders, I designed the user account as a mix of conversational UI and a more traditional UI.

The conversation with a Bleach bot or hair stylist would handle specific advice and product recommendations based on the customer's hair details and goals. The traditional interface handled everything else: past orders, signing up for Hair Parties & Tutorials, and updating user info.

My last couple of weeks at Bleach were spent collaborating on UI design with the in-house creative team, leading up to the release of an initial beta version of the platform focused on delivering a new and improved ecommerce experience.

The conversational UI and journeys would be worked on in parallel and released at a later stage, building on the foundations laid during this project.