A social media app aimed at creating a more authentic makeup community experience.
Project Span: 1.5 years (2018-2019)
My Role: User Research, Mobile UX/UI (iPhone), User Testing, Concept Development
Project Focus:
The goal of this project was to create a new authentic online makeup community. After research, it was clear that many inside this space were burnt-out using current social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube). Makeup artists were battling algorithms. Aspiring artists had no chance competing with those who already had many followers. On the flip side, followers had trouble searching to find what they were looking for, and felt less and less trust towards the sponsored influencers. Our aim was to revamp the user experience at both ends, and additionally satisfy the business needs of generating income. Our main MVP features included:
Additional areas explored:
Process:
I started with interviews in different cities: Chicago, Lyon, Paris, and Stockholm. I interviewed both artists/influencers who were active in posting on social media, and also general followers who were mostly on the consuming end. I asked questions about their experiences using social media inside the makeup-world, and provided a mocked up click-through of our MVP product to capture their initial reactions and level of understanding. I also presented three different branding mood boards to help us choose a direction for visual design.
After grabbing insights, we adapted the current mockups and saved new ideas for future features. Mockups were fleshed out into detailed wireframes with notes to pass to the developers. After a few months we rapidly pushed out an MVP app into the Apple App Store. We did a second round of interviews in Chicago + NYC to get new feedback on this first version. From here, we fixed immediate issues, started to add additional features, and explored how to further optimize our experience.
Examples of questions tackled:
Top Challenges:
Links:
Collaborators: Rob Depinto, Elie Monge, Vinit Jain, François CANTONNET