SOS Dance
Empowing a
SOS is a franchise dance school dedicated to empowering individuals through the art of dance. The business model is straightforward: Headquarters' choreographers craft routines inspired by popular songs, performed by professional dancers. These routines are then taught to BOSSES (instructors), who lead in-person classes for QUEENS (students).
Year
2024 - Ongoing
Responsive Web App
What we did
SOS Dance was using Eventbrite to book and manage their classes. But with over 100 classes a week across the UK and 44 BOSSES (teachers), it had outgrown Eventbrite. The system had become time-consuming for users and no longer met their basic needs — nor did it support their growth.
Crucial to business growth was the high cost of Eventbrite's fees and how that money could be better used within SOS to benefit both the organization and its end users.
The goal was simple: "Build an MVP to help migrate from Eventbrite, so we can reduce the time BOSSES (teachers) and Queens (pupils) spend on admin."
With limited time and budget, I led the project as a Product Consultant and Designer, alongside a Lead Developer. We approached the challenge with a test-and-learn attitude.
200% improvement in GMV
2000 tickets sold within the 1st month
5 months designed and built
"This project exceeded our expectations. Your calm, steady leadership ensured we met the deadline and delivered a product that truly delighted our users."
Bonnie Lister Parsons
CEO, sos dance
A new UI foundation
To give the product the foundations to grow, we built a design system focusing on the UI kit. We know it will evolve, and there will be two very distinct arms of the system that need to align: the marketing pages, fun and full of inspiration, and the booking system, functional, clutter-free, and with a touch of delight. Both need to grow from the same foundation.
Key Features
After interviewing users and customers, we narrowed the MVP scope to a streamlined but impactful version that improved key parts of the experience. Major pain points included event setup and the ticket purchase process, so we prioritized dynamic event pages to reduce admin and integrated Stripe to enable faster payments via Link and Apple Pay.
Queen Hub
The first step toward personalization was giving users their own hub. From there, we can start tailoring their experience in the future. We wanted to make booking as easy as possible. The main pain points were having to enter details every time and difficulty understanding key information.
Marketing pages and components
We used Storyblok, a headless CMS, to build the UI and give us strong control over the frontend. This allowed us to create reusable marketing blocks that could be placed anywhere on the site as needed. Research led us to improve messaging on the landing page to better set expectations for first-time customers and inspire them in equal measure.
