Skin First, Your BFF in Skincare
Snapshot
The Challenge
Help customers discover and purchase skincare products that are suitable for their skin to achieve the desired outcomes.
My Process
I approached this 2-week design sprint challenge using the Design Thinking framework to:
- set the business goal.
- planned and conducted market analysis and user research.
- synthesized qualitative and quantitative data to define the right problem, create user personas and uncovering opportunities.
- conducted a design-studio to generate and explore ideas.
- built paper prototypes for rapid testing with target users and progressive iteration.
- designed hi-fidelity wireframes in Figma.
The Solution
Gathered from the research data, taking care of the facial skin is a personal journey. There is a requirement to personalise the experience of purchasing the products and equip customers with educational information to empower them to take care of their skin.
The Outcomes
To implement the personalise solution, I built a mobile application to allow users to:
- Find the skincare routines that suit their skin types and conditions and personalised recommendation.
- Provide product ingredients to match the skin types and information about the benefits and outcomes, how to use the product, pro tips.
- Give point incentive to customers to encourage them to provide reviews with photos and ratings.
- Purchase products through this application. Users can use the collected points from product reviews to purchase this app.
Try Skin First prototype (in Figma)
Learn more about my detail process, please keep reading 😊
Overview
I grew up in a society where glowing, light complexion skin was the benchmark for a beautiful woman. I received many skincare tips and tricks from my mother and sister-in-law, who willing to spend a lot of time and money on research and experiments to find better products each time for visible results. I’m lucky in that sense because I seldom experiment on my own. After all, these endless product options in the market make me feel fatigued and apprehensive, and more so when they are costly. However, each of us have unique skin conditions and needs; this makes some of their recommendations don’t work on my skin.
Facial skin care is a personal journey; people want to invest in the right products. With this notion, I ponder on the question– how might we help people find and purchase skincare products with confidence and feel excited about the outcomes?
Understanding the Beauty Industry
I started researching the market to understand consumer behaviour, trends, who is currently disrupting the industry, what are the market gap and opportunity.
In Numbers
The beauty industry is one of the markets that remained unaffected, despite the fluctuations in the economy.
The industry’s revenue is expected to grow more than $379 billion within the next four years.
Skincare is driving much of the growth. In the past 5 years, it made up to 24.9% of total $52.4 billion in annual revenue. Skincare has become an increasingly lucrative business for cosmetic companies because it has a higher-margin business than cosmetics.
Social Media
Much of the skincare boom owes to social media, with the rise of selfie culture that boosted the demand for innovative beauty products.
Influencers and social media are key for skincare to lead the beauty industry. They are sharing and explaining to their followers about why and how they use certain products in their skincare routines, and what impacts they have on their skin. Skincare experts and makeup artists have become big stars on social media like Youtube and Instagram.
Education on Product Ingredients
The skincare market is driven by wellness trends that include fitness, clean eating, and natural products. Customers become aware of the ingredients in the products they are purchasing. In the same way, you might check ingredients on food packaging. They need to educate themselves about skincare ingredients to bring empowerment to themselves and know how to take care of their skin.
Moreover, there are so many product options out there due to companies rush to the market with their products. It will be useful for customers to have current knowledge about how brands formulated their products, which makes them trusted formulas and what they do to the skins will help them see the result they want.
Insight from users
I planned a set of research questions to validate my assumptions, conducted interviews with eleven people in my network who care about skincare and makeup. The goal is to understand their problems and motivations in finding and buying skincare products; how and where they shop for beauty products.
Key insights from user interviews are:
- People want to understand their skin types/conditions in order to use the right products.
- People have lacked knowledge because the ingredient information was mostly written in chemistry compound names.
- People want to see results, regardless of budget.
- Most people factor in the weather and environments conditions when trying new products.
- Products stop working after a certain period of use.
- Some people purchase a product because of its beautiful packaging.
- Lifestyle and food are highly relevant to healthy skin.
“It’s hard to understand your skin.”
“There’s a lot of trials and errors in skincare.”
“I don’t understand the ingredient terms.”
“It will be good to know how different products work together.”
“Once the skin is damaged, it takes longger time to repair.”
User Mindsets (Persona)
There were two distinct mindsets that emerged from the qualitative data:
- The Curious
- The Veteran
Meet the Curious-Mind
“It is hard to understand my skin.”
Their behaviours are:
- an early adopter and quite outgoing,
- care about their look, have a simple skincare routine and change products frequently for experiment and to achieve better results.
- They follow trends and social media influencers for product reviews, trends and pro-tips.
- They are likely to purchase attractive packaging products.
- They are regular at Mecca and Sephora, but sometimes purchase products from drug-stores and Priceline.
Their pain-points are:
- overwhelmed with product options in the market,
- trying many products and have minimal knowledge about ingredients and purposes,
- struggle to understand how different products work well together,
- have inconsistency in their skincare routine.
Their motivations are:
- want to look good,
- want to achieve instant results,
- aware of products testing on the animal,
- price-driven.
Meet the Veteran
“I am happy with my current skin condition and settle with product search.”
Their behaviours are:
- have solid AM and PM routines,
- tend to be loyal to certain brands,
- have the buying power.
- They do research around the products before purchasing by seeking reviews from peers or research online from reliable resources.
- In their mind: prevention is better than a repair,
- happy with their skin conditions,
- settled with product search, and occasional check-in for new products out of interest.
- They are a regular customer of Paula Choice, Deciem, Mecca, Sephora.
However, they still have pain-points:
- The product stops working after a certain time,
- the boredom of using the same products.
Their motivations are:
- want to age gracefully by slowing down the ageing,
- looking for innovative products like technology to help them achieve their goals.
Looking at these two mindsets, I decided to focus on solving the problems for the Curious in this design sprint.
The Problem
The Curious try different products frequently, to achieve the desired look with the budget they have. They are more likely to purchase products in the store based on recommendations from sales-assistants, without a deeper understanding of products and how it worked for their skin. Therefore, the problem I see is –
The curious mind needs to understand their skin conditions to know which products work better for them. So they can feel empowered to make informed decisions and achieve healthy-looking skin.
How Might We (HMW)
I used How Might We method to explore possibilities to help the users by posting these questions:
- HMW help users to understand their skin conditions better?
- HMW help users to understand what and how products work for their skin to get the results they want effectively?
- HMW personalise product experience for users?
- HMW simplify skincare routine for the users to gain long term impact?
Hypothesis
Customers believe that having a good understanding of their skin and products will improve their experience to look after their skin.
And I know SkinFirst is making an impact when there is an uptake in users.”
Building Solutions
Design Studio
A design studio is a method to generate many design solutions rapidly around specific problems. Doing a design studio with others is super helpful, especially in a solo project. It helps to understand and consider others’ perspectives to enrich the solutions. I conducted a 45 minutes design studio workshop with two other participants.
The following are some great ideas produced from the design studio:
- In-depth onboarding to personalise product experience.
- Provide educational and relevant content about skincare and beauty.
- Product reviews from other users and preferred skin experts.
- Product library of current use, recommendations, wishlist.
Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
I needed to prioritise the features that are most relevant to the user’s needs. For the MVP purpose I prioritised the following features to meet the immediate user needs:
- The on-boarding process to obtain relevant information about users’ requirements to provide personalised recommendations and routines.
- Provide users with educational information and reviews from other customers to leverage content from the user community.
- Personalised products library.
Market Positioning
Competitions
I looked into the major competitors in the market and compared them on the following categories: personalisation, education/ information of ingredient, user review, product application, and engagement/ entertainment.
The key insights from the comparison table are:
- Most of these brands have similar ways of providing product reviews/ ratings from customers. Makeup Alley is purely using users reviews and ratings as their content.
- Paula’s Choice provides extensive information about product ingredients. However, the website is not as user-friendly to navigate– the users need to Google the ingredients to obtain relevant content.
- Most of these brands don’t have product personalisation and information on layering different products. However, Paula’s Choice have a routine onboarding to personalise product recommendation.
Opportunities:
- A personalised curated and topical product experience
- Educational and relevant information about skin health and products
Unique Selling Points (USP)
From the following diagram, Skin First aims for the product personalisation and education position to help customers looking after their skin health.
Challenge:
- It takes time to build great user-based content,
- Building a brand strategy to get influencers and experts onboard.
Content Strategy
I conducted an open card sorts sessions with five participants to design a high-level content structure. Through this method, I found two content categories to design for personalisation and product information.
User Story
I created user stories to understand their experiences when purchasing and using different skincare products and provide possible solutions.
User Flow
I created a golden path to illustrate a seamless process to complete the user’s goal/ task. This process helped to build the prototype’s elements quickly by seeing the necessary steps.
Scenario: The user wants to change moisturiser to something more hydrating in winter. S/he is looking for information around what product can keep the skin hydrated all day.
Prototype: Start from the Basic
I started building a paper prototype to test each of the solutions. This basic low-cost prototype allows me to quickly test and validate solutions in the progressive iteration process.
Usability Testing
I tested the prototype on five participants and captured the feedback from each session with photographs and notepad. This process is one of my favourites because it allowed me to receive constructive feedback and to accelerate improvement.
Selection of key learning was:
- The users want to be able to filter products based on ratings, skin-types, prices, bestsellers, etc.
- The users who have existing routines can enter her currently used products into the library. This function allows personalisation around product and content.
- The users want to be able to compare products to others.
- The product categorisations could have simpler labels, such as the face, lips, eyes. Because some users might not understand terms like boosters.
- The users found the educational information and review are useful to help with purchasing.
- The users didn’t mind scrolling on the phone to see the content. But need to consider fingers fitting on navigation/ menu size.
- To include a capability to create a shopping list to make shopping easier.
I also conducted tests for onboarding section with the same participants to get their feedback around the flow and tone of voice. Here are the key insights:
- Users preferred to have the progress bar, to help them know their location/ progress.
- Different treatment is necessary for certain questions for example; multiple answers need to have the
- Make certain questions non-compulsory or allow the user to exit a situation for example: provide a skip button or next button to continue.
- Have a question about currently loved products.
- Adding more choices for the answers to the question about the user’s environments, this allowed better personalisation for global users.
Mid-Fi Wireframe
I continued to build the high-fidelity prototype in Figma using Apple’s Human Interface guidelines.
Product Roadmap
Further testing and iteration will be driven by users feedback for the next development sprints to design the following features:
- Add scanner and result tracking feature to allow users to monitor the results and have an immersive experience.
- Create a branding strategy for Skin First to attract influencers and experts come on board.
- Create a strategy around the user-based content building and reviews to encourage users to contribute and learn from the community.
- Build a website application version.
Retrospective
I learned that UX projects are a team sport. As much as I like having full control and freedom of working independently, I deeply appreciate collaboration synergy, rich discussion and ideas exploration with the right people.
