Odiseo Viveros

Urban Massage

When I joined Urban Massage I was the first in-house Designer. The task was massive. After close to two years of operating, having customers and therapists across 5 major cities in the UK, the team had no Design System in place, developers worked without a clear process, and the amount of products to work on was extensive:

• For customers: iOS and Android app, plus a web platform
• For therapists: iOS and Android app, plus a web platform
• For Customer Service: two web platforms

I realised there were a few things that we needed to tackle. The products were being used, the customer base was growing creating a lot of demand, but we were lagging behind a poorly built brand identity, our pool of therapists was becoming too small, and development of new features was slow and buggy. All this showed me that we needed to work in the following order:

• Understand, build and live the brand: who are the customers, how do therapists see us, what do we want to portray as a brand. I created a brand book, Visual Design guidelines, and worked on a Design System to be used by designers and developers.
• Set up an agile process for development. I started daily stand-ups, encouraged the use of tracking services (Jira and Confluence), started a backlog, set up a QA process with an external service provider, I created and took care of the Roadmap, setting specific goals for each business stream.
• I expanded the design team from a one-man operation to a small team of three designers, I ran UX workshops, user interviews, surveys, panels, looked into our analytics data, created user flows and oversaw the design and development of new features for each product.

As a result, the way the company worked changed. Within one year, design and development efficiency increased, bugs were almost non-existent, testing became a ritual. We also saw an increase in revenue, the company launched its first two services outside of the UK, expanding to the continent. Customer Service and satisfaction increased, but also therapists started seeing Urban Massage as a way to increase their earnings, simplify the way they handled their bookings and experienced great customer service, job security increased and loved the attention to detail, safety and increased client base they Urban Massage presented.