The Beauty Concierge App

Category: Case Studies UX Design

Project Overview

About & Duration

This is an MVP for a beauty app. My topic is on the growing beauty industry, growing beauty users and the emerging frustrations they face. This started as a personal observation when I accompanied a friend shopping for beauty products. I observed her frustrations and listened to her vent. I then researched further and used it as the topic for my final project for the UX course at General Assembly.

Duration: 10 weeks, as part of final project for User Experience Design Course, General Assembly

Tools & Method

Problem Statement, User Research, Market & Competitive Research, In-person Interviews, User flows, User Journey, User Persona, Sitemap, Card Sorting, Sketches, Wireframes, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Iteration

Tools: Sketch, InVision, Adobe XD, Marvel, Paper

Challenges

Getting more people to test and determining the sitemap that makes sense for an app.

Learning

Card sorting is a humbling experience because it teaches you how users perceive and group data. I also learned sitemap and content for an app, website and other platforms should be designed and customized based on priority on what the user wants/needs to see on each platforms. Also, along with users, it is important to understand the business viability of your design and involve stakeholders frequently for their feedback.

Please note: For the sake of this project and timeline, I was only able to interview women, so those are the images and user persona that you see in the presentation. I believe beauty along with other products and services is all inclusive and I’ve tried to maintain that tone. Going forward, I hope to speak with a broader spectrum of users and see how this can be solved better.

Synopsis

Beauty users want to shop for beauty products to enhance their look and meet their skin needs, however, feel overwhelmed with the number of product choices available. Despite doing their own research, they prefer to ask for help in-store but struggle in getting guided correctly. Often they find themselves stuck in the cycle of buying products and returning or exchanging.

I spoke with users to understand the frustration and designed an MVP for a beauty app that acts as a platform to connect beauty shoppers with local beauty experts present in various beauty stores. My design is inspired by the ZocDoc app as currently, we don’t have this in the market where an app acts as a one-stop shop and users get to search and decide whom they’d like to meet, and at which store, after seeing the profile, reviews and ratings of each beauty expert.

The aim is that by creating a personalized approach in-store, shoppers can get help from trained beauty professionals, who will educate and help them select the products based on their requirements, and this way they will feel more satisfied with their purchases.

We will know we’re successful if we see a decline in product exchanges or returns, positive feedback on consultations, and an overall increase in sales and revisits to the beauty stores.

While interviewing users, I learned they would prefer using this service on their phone a lot more than on a website, and so for this project, I focused on the app.

Sharing below my research, findings and design solution as part of my UX final project completed and presented at General Assembly during our User Experience Design Course. Beauty Concierge_UX Project at General Assembly