Context
Smudg is a cutting-edge, AI-powered beauty and skincare platform offering hyper-personalized product recommendations, beauty routines, and expert advice.
Problem
49% of users weren't completing the onboarding process and lacked incentives to engage with the app.
Approach
Redesign the product in a way that would be more user-friendly, interactive, and engaging. Working with the founders and their in-house dev team, I focused onboarding, product matches & discovery as core product features for improvement based on existing (as well as newly gathered) research to wire, test, and launch the MVP to the app store.
Role: UI UX Design
Timeline: 4 Weeks
Result: Hi-fi, interactive prototype / investor pitch deck / landing page
Discovery
For Secondary Research, I conducted a market analysis of beauty and wellness apps intersecting consumer goods and social selling, intervieiwng new and existing users in both Asia and the USA via 1:1 video and leveraging Google Forms surveys so that I could get a better understanding of why nearly 50% of users weren't converting.
I found 40% of our users value personalization, want to stay updated on the latest trends and news, and enjoy receiving member perks. 30% of respondents indicated they would be more engaged if there were exclusive rewards or discounts offered in exchange for their engagement.
While users seemed impartial to self-generated content, I learned that product demonstrations, instructional videos, exclusive content, and live streams would all be valuable additions to the product down the road.
Usability testing
My initial findings, in combination with available market research, indicating that users would be more likely to use (and pay for) the platform if the value propositions were clearer. Over the course of the remaining 1.5 weeks, 5 users tested lo-fi prototypes, and 5 tested hi-fi prototypes to validate my assumption.
Participants were given a short presentation, an interview, and then testing on a lo-res and high-res Figma prototype over 1.5 weeks. All participants were asked to complete the same three activities in the same manner regardless of fidelity:
Participants were between the ages of 18 and 35, students or working professionals, and wanted to learn more about skincare and/or makeup through a mobile-first approach. All proved to be eager and capable of navigating each of the above features with little to no issues, and so I hopped almost immediately into hi-fidelity.
Result
I designed an overall experience that let users take control of their beauty and skincare routines, form healthy habits, and find new brands through a network where beauty professionals, skincare experts, and community members connect.
Smudg will continue to develop my designs and conduct another round of usability testing, with an official relaunch in July 2023. I've joined the team as a freelance UI UX designer to help with the next stage!