Adriana Kastrup

Who is Adriana Kastrup?

Adriana Kastrup is a renowned tarot reader, numerologist and astrology scholar, with over 40 years of experience. Throughout her career, she offered consultancy for soap operas and films, in addition to having published articles in important newspapers and magazines in Brazil, including O Globo and Marie Claire Brasil.

Project Requirements

For this project, it was necessary to redesign an online tarot booking system, where people trained and hand-selected by Adriana would serve online tarot readings.

Problems identified

Initially, the website already offered online appointments, however, in an inefficient way. The first benchmarks have already shown several problems:

- It forced users to make unnecessary decisions

- It had unnecessary steps like cart

- There were unnecessary fields to be filled in

- The website was slow

- The website spent a lot of time down

Yes, the worst of the problems was the website being down most of the time, and it was probably the main culprit for the site's difficulty in reaching sales goals.

Interaction analysis

Forced choice

The website forced users to make a decision as to which professional would serve them. In a way, users don't like making this type of decision, especially when they need to spend some time reading about who the person who will serve them is. This decision-making tends to reduce the number of people who reach the next stage, which would be choosing the date and time of the service, and then payment.

Cart

A crucial step in common e-commerce, the shopping cart had no function in this case, and added unnecessary complexities for the user. Any time saved by loading a new page, scanning and reading it, and ultimately realizing that you would need to click another button to continue to the other screen would be welcome.

Checkout fields

Website consultations would be 100% online, which would be facilitated by an automatically generated online meeting link, so the address field was not strictly necessary. There was no "shipping" to be sent to that address.

Challenges

The main challenges were in relation to technology and budget limits of the project. Due to the complexity of a scheduling system that concentrated around 15 professionals, and involved payment methods and generation of automatic links for online consultations, studies and developments would be necessary in a level that a small company in Brazil would normally not be willing to invest in.

Implemented Solutions

To solve these problems, we chose to use WordPress, given its flexibility and wide range of available plugins.

Scheduling: The Amelia plugin was chosen for its robustness and ability to manage multiple professionals efficiently.

Payment and Checkout: Integration with WooCommerce and Mercado Pago was used for payment processing, with customization that eliminated the need for a shopping cart and irrelevant fields at checkout.

Hosting and Availability: Migrating to a new hosting infrastructure and replacing the old scheduling plugin resolved the optimization issues, ensuring that the site was available and performing well.

Design Choices

I will detail here some of the design choices for this website. I would like to make it very clear that some principles needed to be broken in this project, but with great care.

The client, Adriana, is not a big fan of defining a single visual identity for herself and the company. In fact, the logo is just her signature, and each project has an identity chosen on the spot. Therefore, even the website pages end up not following a single rule. However, whenever possible, I tried to keep elements consistent and persistent throughout the project.

Typography

The typography chosen was Vidaloka for titles, and Open Sans for the website's textual content. The concept was to combine the traditionality of an ancient activity, the tarot, with modernity and sophistication, hence the choice of a font with serifs, and another without.

Color Palette

As i said earlier, Adriana is not a big fan of using the same colors everywhere. But the main colors of the website are show below. A warm color palette, where yellow means "going forward".

Results

The improvements implemented resulted in an increase of approximately 1000% in revenue, exceeding all initial expectations and providing a much more fluid and efficient user experience.