Darling Africa Chat Bot
The ask.
Darling hair is a high end synthetic hair product aimed at people of African descent. They said they wanted an app, but what they actually needed was a digital storefront that was mobile-first and used as little data as possible so people in salons could browse products and find the styles they want.
But why WhatsApp?
Smartphone penetration is really high in Africa. Data costs are huge in relation to monthly income and people want to look at lots of options for hairstyles. Everyone already uses WhatsApp and it doesn’t use a lot of data. Plus we wouldn’t have to convince people to download a new app.
Images>Text.
With hair being a visual and aesthetic product, we needed to think outside the box to create the best user experience in a text-based medium. We created a visual navigation system using image cards that featured numbered selections.
Simple, Smart, and Pan-African.
The bot is deployed in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria with more to come allowing people to find the styles they like, see information, find a salon or purchase online.
We scraped product info and media from the old site and created decision trees for each market based on products, styles and categories. Usability testing helped us find a way to show people what they wanted in the fewest steps possible. All product info is added to a spreadsheet which auto-populates an Adobe XD file so we can easily create new product cards and minimise the time it takes to deploy new styles. A simple, smart, low-effort solution to content management.
