Your Cosmic Consultant

The Problem

Sarah is a new business owner looking to provide intuitive spiritual services such as tarot readings, chart readings and distance reiki. She is in need of a business website that provides details on her experience and service offering and encourages customers to book her services.

How might we create a website that lets customers know that Sarah is now open for business and encourages them to book her services?

The Solution

The website developed for Your Cosmic Consultant is designed to encourage customers to book even without having previously using Sarah's services by providing customer testimonials, highlighting Sarah's expertise, and developing a website simple to navigate and use, inspiring trust in new potential customers.

The Starting Line

Outlining the Project Scope

Before starting the design process, I corresponded with my client regarding her website needs, her expertise and what services she would be providing. She noted that she would be providing intuition-guided tarot readings, astrological chart readings, and distance reiki. In addition to selling and booking these services online, she wanted a place to blog and house content.

Proto Persona

I proposed that her target user would likely be mid-late 20s through early 30s. Someone who is curious about spirituality but may not have ever had a 1:1 intuitive reading. She is looking to book a reading to satisfy her curiosity, but has yet to book because she wants to be sure she is selecting the right person/service.

Key Goals for Your Cosmic Consultant

Defining the Scope

Client Questionnaire

To start the ideation process, I drafted questions for my client to answer that would help me understand her aesthetic, understand what sections her website would need, tech savviness, and her familiarity with different web builders. I learned that she had started to use Wix, but hadn't gotten very far with building her own website. As she was already fairly familiar with the platform, wanted to book/schedule services and host a blog on her website it made sense to build this website on Wix as well. I thought the learning curve of Webflow or another more customizable web builder would require too much of a learning curve for her purposes.

Aesthetic Alignment

I asked my client to describe how they would like their website to look and feel using 5 adjectives. She choose feminine, bold, modern, artsy and simple. I then took these initial adjectives and used them to create a Pinterest board. I pinned a few inspiration images then shared the board and asked my client to pin along with me. I explained that these pins did not have to be website-specific, but could be color palettes, web design, illustrations or anything else that matched the vibe they were trying to get across on Your Cosmic Consultant.

Moodboard

After a few pins, I got clearly see my client's aesthetic and vision. I told her I'm getting a "desert at dusk, artsy bohemian femme vibe" from the board. She said "yes, you got it!!!" so I moved forward with synthesizing the inspiration into a more defined moodboard.

Developing Solutions

Low Fidelity Prototyping

I used Figma to make my initial low fidelity prototypes. I suggested that her homepage start with a headshot to help humanize her practice. I dedicated a space for fine line digital illustrations to give the website a unique, customized feeling. I made a section for some short testimonials that would help encourage potential customers to book.

Style Guide

I toyed around with a few site ID options based on the adjectives the client provided; ultimately I selected the typeface Grape Nuts, as it felt simple and artsy. At this point in the process, I also used the iPad app, Procreate to draw some fine line illustrations (hands to depict Reiki, the Empress Tarot Card, and feathers) to highlight Your Cosmic Consultant's key services.

High Fidelity Prototyping

What's Next?

What I would do with more time:

• I would do additional research of other web hosting platforms--I've since learned that Shopify has a Wordpress plugin, so it could have been a viable option for an e-commerce site that has a simple blogging module, with better responsiveness.
• Design additional illustrations so if the client decides to expand her business offering there will be unique illustrations already matching the visual design of her website to use as needed.
• Spend more time with user testing, I did a quick usability test with a user to ensure everything worked as expected; which it did. But testing with a larger group may have identified other opportunities.