Bookla
One booking app for any local service, built for the business and the customer at once.
What I walked into
Chili Labs wanted a single app where you could book any local service: a haircut, a car inspection, a horse ride.
The motto was "Stop calling! Use Bookla!"
That meant four native apps, one for customers and one for businesses, each on iOS and Android. I led design and drew the first version myself, from research to launch.
What I learned
We had three weeks for research and a prototype, so I started with the health and beauty sector. I talked to four business owners where they worked, from a personal trainer to the manager of a large salon, and to twenty customers.
Businesses lost money on missed appointments and kept their schedules by phone and on paper. Customers put off calling, used a different app for each service, and had no way to see what was free.
How I worked
A desktop calendar on a phone
Businesses already had booking tools, mostly on desktop, with each staff member's day in its own column. We repeated that pattern in the business app so nobody had to relearn their own schedule. A desktop screen holds far more than a phone, so I added zoom: three levels of the time grid, sideways scroll across staff, and the hours pinned on the left. With one calendar, the avatars go away and the slots take the full width.
The whole booking on one screen
In the customer app, date, time, service, specialist, price and address stay together. It's easier to check what you've entered when you can see all of it before you confirm.
Showing what changed
A business can edit a booking after the customer made it. The customer gets a notice, and the fields that changed are highlighted, so there's nothing to work out.
What shipped
Bookla launched in January 2019. Later I handed the product to designers on my team and moved to another one.
The apps are still in the stores on the foundation I set. Today the customer app has 4.8 on the App Store and 4.9 on Google Play, about 3,000 ratings on each, and 50K+ downloads on Android.
In 2021 it won a W3 Silver award.
