Poppy
Elevated beauty-management personalized to your preferences
Product Design
Sustainable Shopping
UX Research
Timeline
6 Weeks
Role
Product Designer
Tools
Figma
Problem
Inadequate management of beauty products, lead to the use of expired items, excessive consumption driven by social media trends, and a lack of ingredient knowledge, necessitating a solution for tracking inventory, providing ingredient information, and offering personalized recommendations.
Solution
| One app that does it all.
💄 Let’s you choose what ingredients you like and which ones you don’t.
💄 Notifies you when you start using a product with ingredients that you don’t like.
💄 Scans all your existing beauty products and generates a auto-categorized inventory for you so you can monitor what’s in your arsenal.
💄 Based on this knowledge Poppy will also provide intuitive suggestions and recommendations such as similar products or tutorials.
Research
I evaluated users' beauty habits, identifying pain points like product misplacement and ingredient awareness. Additionally, I explored social media's influence on consumption trends. Through this study, I aim to uncover solutions and develop Poppy's features to address these challenges effectively. By understanding user preferences, I ensured design decisions foster positive online engagement within the beauty industry.
Competitive Analysis Insights
After conducting substantial amounts of research, I realized I’m not the only person that faces these issues. In fact, these are quite common and unresolved. I came up with Poppy to tackle these issues in a more facile and streamlined manner. For my initial research, I looked at existing applications and services and charted a competitive analysis to understand what was missing. The aim was to recognize pain points and challenges faced by the users such a misplacing products, not knowing all the ingredients in a product, etc.
User Interview Insights
Through user interviews, I explored social media's impact on consumption trends and purchasing decisions, identifying solutions for challenges faced. This informed Poppy's feature development to address user needs, guiding design decisions and assessing the app's role in promoting positive beauty industry behavior.
I charted an Information Architecture graph to effectively structure and organize the information I wanted to present in the interface. This graph not only facilitated my understanding of how various pieces of information relate to each other but also provided clarity for making subsequent design decisions. Visualizing the hierarchy and relationships within the app allowed me to establish a blueprint for designing user navigation, ensuring ease of access. Moreover, it also helped me in identifying any potential gaps or redundancies, thereby enabling me to optimize the app's performance and prevent overload.
One of the star features of Poppy, is it's inventory. Users scan any existing products that they may have and it will self sort itself within an appropriate category. Moreover, Poppy will give it's users all the necessary information about that product, such as allergens, toxins, even notify them of the product's expiration!
Users will have a chance to set up their preferences early on, but they don't have to, they can always come back to it whenever they want. These preferences are very important as they will enable Poppy to guide it's users to the best product for them. User can tell Poppy what they like and what they don't, what skin concerns they'd like to target or what kind of make-up looks they usually go for.
User Testing
Based on the preliminary user research, I conducted the first round of user testing through low-fidelity wireframes. I approached 4 people and asked them to interact with these wireframes. This helped me eliminate the chances of any major fallbacks that may arise later into the design process. This is what I learned:
Observation
Ingredient alerts are well received as it would help user make more informed decisions about the products they use, aligning with their concern about the ingredients used in their beauty products.
The auto-categorized inventory feature would be particularly useful, given the struggle with keeping track of beauty products and tendency to purchase duplicates.
Feedback
Users appreciate Poppy’s focus on product organization, lack of ingredient awareness and the influence of beauty trends.
Recommendation
Users suggest additional features or improvements to enhance the user experience further, such as the ability to manually input product expiration dates and receive notifications and a community section for sharing tips and reviews.
Users suggest promoting the app's sustainability aspect, emphasizing its role in promoting more informed and sustainable consumption habits within the cosmetics industry.
Prototype
Conclusion
To conclude, working on this project has been a journey of many trials and errors. It’s not over yet. I have recieved a lot of good feedback from my mentor and peers and I intend to improve upon my iteration at my earliest convenience. Poppy was one of the most intense but also one of the most fun projects I have worked on in a long, long time. Even though I was suffering from a terrible creative block for quite sometime, when it lifted it was a ride. I will continue to improve and work on this project to hopefully bring it to life and provide a tangible solution to a very real problem space.