LookRyt
Salon Booking App + Vendor Management Platform
Designed a two-sided salon marketplace from the ground up for the UAE, helping customers discover and book appointments across independent salons while giving vendors a self-serve way to set up their salon, staff, and services and manage bookings.
UAE
iOS / Android
Customers
Salon vendors / owners / managers
Staff members
Product Designer
UX strategy
Information architecture
User flows
Wireframing
UI design
Prototyping
Two-sided product complexity
Booking clarity across multiple steps
Staff and calendar management
Scalable service structure
Designed remotely
Project Summary
Problem
LookRyt is a marketplace connecting customers to independent salons across the UAE, it doesn't own or operate any of them, and the product didn't exist yet. Salons had no self-serve way to join the platform, set up their profile, staff, and services, and start taking bookings, and customers had no single place to discover and book across salons instead of finding one individually.
Goal
Design a self-serve onboarding flow that lets any independent salon set itself up on LookRyt (profile, verification, services, and staff) without support from the LookRyt team, alongside a customer app for discovering and booking across every salon on the platform.
Ownership
Owned the design end to end for both sides of the product, working solo with no existing product, prior research, or team to hand off to, from early structure through final UI.
Shipped
A vendor onboarding flow for salons to register, verify, and set up their profile, services, and staff without support; a shared real-time calendar; and a customer app for discovery and booking across every salon on the platform.
Impact
Impact wasn't instrumented on this engagement, so there's no measured result to report. The direct business goal was self-serve onboarding: every salon that can set itself up is one that doesn't cost LookRyt manual setup time.
Goals
The design focused on three goals:
Make salon discovery and booking simple for customers comparing many independent salons, not searching for one they already know.
Give any salon owner a way to set up their business alone, with no technical background and no support from LookRyt.
Build a shared, real-time calendar so staff availability and bookings never fall out of sync.
Research & Insights
From the customer side, the requirement was a discovery experience built for a market with many small, independent salons rather than a few well-known chains, since customers needed to compare, not just search for a name they already knew.
From the vendor side, the clearest requirement was that onboarding had to be self-serve. LookRyt didn't have the team to manually set up every salon that joined, so a new vendor needed to go from signup to bookable without support.
Design Strategy
The design strategy treated LookRyt as a two-sided platform with two different mental models. Customers need a guided, confidence-building journey toward booking, while vendors, often running a salon with no in-house tech support, need a system simple enough to set up and manage themselves. Instead of forcing both user types into one shared structure, I designed two connected but distinct flows, which made the overall experience easier to understand and more aligned with how each audience actually uses the product.
Customer Experience
The customer flow was designed to make salon discovery and appointment booking feel easier, clearer, and more polished. The focus was on reducing friction across the journey from browsing to confirmation.
Discover salons and services
The entry experience prioritizes exploration by helping users browse salons, categories, and services in a more structured way. This improves discoverability and helps users move toward booking with less effort.
Review and select
Once users find a relevant option, the experience gives them a clearer path to reviewing details and moving toward appointment selection. Better hierarchy helps users understand what matters before committing.
Book an appointment
The booking journey was designed to reduce decision fatigue by making service, staff, and slot selection feel more guided. This helps users complete bookings with more confidence and less confusion.
Manage upcoming appointments
The experience also supports post-booking visibility, allowing users to revisit and manage their appointment journey more easily. This improves continuity beyond the initial booking action.
Vendor Experience
The vendor flow was designed around operational clarity. Instead of focusing on visual exploration, this side of the product prioritizes visibility, control, and fast task completion.
Manage bookings
Bookings are a core operational layer of the platform, so the vendor experience needed to make appointment management more visible and easier to act on. This helps vendors stay in control of day-to-day scheduling.
Manage staff and calendars
Salon operations depend heavily on staff availability and scheduling. I treated staff and calendar management as core workflows rather than secondary settings, making them easier to understand and maintain.
Manage services
The service-management flow helps vendors add, organize, and maintain their offerings in a more structured way. This creates consistency for the business and supports long-term scalability.
Key UX Decisions
Problem:
A salon owner joining LookRyt has no technical background and no LookRyt rep helping them set up. If onboarding required support, it wouldn't scale past a handful of salons.
What I did:
Designed a step-by-step registration flow (business details, photo/document verification, services, and staff) that a salon owner can complete alone on their phone, with clear progress and verification status at each step.
Why:
Onboarding had to work with zero hand-holding for LookRyt to grow past its first few salons.
Problem:
If each salon's calendar lived separately, or staff scheduling was buried under Settings, double-bookings and scheduling conflicts were inevitable, and calendar accuracy is the one thing a booking marketplace can't get wrong.
What I did:
Designed a shared calendar with Day, Week, and Crew views as its own top-level tab. Every staff member's availability sits in the same real-time grid, so a customer booking instantly reflects across the vendor's calendar.
Why:
Removes double-bookings structurally, and treats scheduling as core to running a salon, which is how owners actually think about their day.
Problem:
New customers usually don't know which salon they want yet. They're choosing between many small independent options, not searching for a name they already have in mind.
What I did:
Led the customer flow with browsable stylist and service cards before pushing into a single salon's page, instead of opening on a search bar.
Why:
Matches how people actually shop for a salon in a market of independents, by browsing and comparing.
Conclusion
LookRyt needed two systems working in sync from day one: a consumer marketplace and a self-serve business tool, built for a market I couldn't visit in person. By separating the customer and vendor experiences into focused, purpose-built journeys, the design turned appointment booking into a simpler, more confident process for customers, while giving any independent salon a way to onboard and run its operations without needing support from the LookRyt team.
The result is a platform built to scale by design: onboarding, staff, and calendar management work as one connected system, so growth doesn't depend on LookRyt's team doing manual setup for every new salon.