Sanova Spa + Salon
A concept study: designing a booking flow as calm as the service it books
Role: UI/UX Designer — self-initiated concept study
Subject: Sanova Spa + Salon — mobile booking for spa and salon services
Timeline: 2 months
Platforms: Native mobile (iOS)
Scope: Icon explorations, hand-drawn user flow, paper wireframes, screen design, high-fidelity interactive prototype
What it demonstrates: Matching interface temperament to service temperament — a booking flow whose pacing, palette, and options are designed around the intimacy of the service being booked
The Challenge
Booking a massage is not booking a flight. The service is personal — someone's hands, your comfort, an hour of trust — and the transaction that leads to it shouldn't feel like a checkout. The brief: make booking feel like the first minute of the appointment. Calm, unhurried, considerate — while still being ruthlessly easy to get through.
That created a specific tension worth designing against: spa-calm usually means slow, and booking-easy usually means fast. The answer wasn't the "three-click rule" (a myth anyway) — it was making every step feel considered rather than counted. Fewer decisions, better-shaped ones.
"The transaction should feel like the treatment: you're asked a few thoughtful questions, and then you're taken care of."
App Icon Design
I began by sketching several icon concepts to explore how the app’s purpose could be communicated visually. After reviewing the initial directions, the client chose to use the existing brand mark as the foundation for the final icon. While this created a distinctive and recognizable presence on the home screen, it also highlighted the tradeoff between strong brand recognition and clearly communicating the app’s functionality. The final direction ultimately reflected the client’s priorities while maintaining a bold visual presence.
Initial App Sketches
These sketches marked the beginning of the concept-development process, giving me a fast and flexible way to capture ideas, explore possibilities, and better understand the problem space. They also helped me communicate potential challenges visually, allowing the client to see both the issues I had identified and the solutions I was proposing. Through sketching, I was able to clarify the project’s direction before moving into more detailed design work.
Architecture Decisions
The considerate questions. The booking configuration screen is the heart of the study: session length presented as three honest options with prices (60/90/120), available times as tappable slots rather than a form, and — the detail that matters most — therapist gender preference, asked plainly and without ceremony. For an intimate service, that one option does more for user comfort than any animation. Service design, not screen design, is what the page should be showing off.
A two-decision home. After sign-in, the welcome screen greets by name and offers exactly two paths: Browse Services or Book a Massage. Returning customers — a spa's actual business — skip the catalog entirely and land in booking. The hierarchy encodes the business model: browsing is for first-timers, rebooking is for regulars.
Flow resolved on paper first. The complete flow — splash → sign-in/sign-up (with confirm and reset paths) → welcome → browse (treatments, massages, body therapies, sleep services) → service detail → request → time/date → confirm → appointment with cancel/edit — was drawn by hand before any screen design, with sticky-note open questions ("special offers? contact form?") tracked on the wireframes themselves.
Calm as a palette with a job. The blue-led visual system and full-bleed treatment photography carry the serenity, while the UI layer underneath stays structured and legible.
The icon: options, then commitment. I explored four directions — massaging hands, stacked stones, a script S, a lotus mark — and presented them with trade-offs. The client chose their brand mark's direction over the more literal options; I disagreed on app-store recognizability, said so, and committed — documenting the trade-off (brand equity vs. at-a-glance meaning) rather than relitigating it.
User flow Sketch
Why Concepts?
Between client and system work, self-initiated studies are where I practice specific muscles without production constraints — here, service-design empathy: shaping a transactional flow around the emotional register of what's being purchased. Real subject, self-imposed constraints, finished prototype.
What The Study Produced
A complete, prototyped booking experience — sign-in through appointment management, built as a high-fidelity interactive prototype (Proto.io) directly from paper sketches.
A worked example of temperament-matched design: the considerate-questions booking pattern, transferable to any personal-service vertical (health, therapy, grooming, home services).
What I’d Do Now
Design the rebooking loop, not just the booking. A spa lives on regulars; the modern version of this study centers "book again" — remembered preferences (length, therapist, time-of-week), one-tap repeat, gentle re-engagement — because the second booking, not the first, is the business.
Meet the platform reality. Independent spas book through Mindbody/Booker/Vagaro rails; today I'd design Sanova's experience on top of the platform layer and ask honestly which moments deserve a custom surface — the same "sometimes it's not an app" judgment as The Gage.
Audit the calm for accessibility. Serene palettes and photo-backed text are where contrast failures hide. I'd validate the entire visual layer against WCAG the way I later did the GM palette — calm that some users can't read isn't calm.
Extend the considerate questions. Accessibility needs, pressure preference, quiet-vs-chat — the therapist-gender option was the start of a pattern; I'd now treat pre-appointment preferences as the product's signature system.