SkinSense
A place for all your skincare needs
APPROACH
Lean UX
DURATION
8 weeks
TOOLS
Figma, Miro, M3 (Material Design 3)
ROLE
UX Designer, UX Researcher
SKILLS
Prototyping, User Interviews, Usability Testing, UI Design
Meet the Team
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Michelle Quan
UX Designer, UX Researcher
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Isabella Margiano
Lead UX Designer, UX Researcher
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Gio Diaz
UX Designer, UX Researcher
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Megan Hagert
UX Designer, UX Researcher
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Kayla Holmes
UX Designer, UX Researcher
Before the Sprints
To start the Lean UX method, we first became familiar with the Lean UX Canvas:
This provides us the foundation of how we are to approach our project.
01. Business/Problem Statement
To start the project, our team got together to discuss the business problem that we will be solving. This is to ensure that we are designing something that will be an effective solution to an already established problem.
Prompts we answered to get to our problem statement:
Problem Statement:
The current state of skincare has focused primarily on users’ skin types and overusing buzzwords. What existing products/services fail to address is the issue of ingredients in skincare products. Our product/service will address this gap by providing accurate usage of the product through information and guides. Our initial focus will be users who want a quick fix to learn about skincare/beginner users. We'll know we are successful when we see the amount of activity measured on the platform.
02. Business Outcomes
Once we had our problem statement, we started to discuss how we would know that we solved the business problem and how we were going to measure success at various stages.
03. Proto-Personas
Then, we created proto-personas. Our personas are created to answer the question: who are we solving this problem for?
Proto personas are created based on our assumptions of what our user would be like. Our personas changed throughout the progression of our project. We started off the sprints with two personas:
04. User Outcomes and Benefits
With our personas now created, we began discussing user outcomes and benefits. We ask ourselves what drives our personas to look for your product and, if they find it, what they might do with it.
To come up with the answer to these questions, we have to ask ourselves hypothetical questions first.
01. What is the user trying to accomplish?
community
creating routine
learning more about skincare products
02. How does the user want to feel during and after the process?
During: less stressed and easily learning about products
After: feel happy and confident to give advice themselves in the community
03. How does our product or service get the user close to a goal(s)?
providing facts to aid their learning
personalization of their routine and keeping track of their skin
04. Why would your user seek out your product?
judgmental-free community
to feel confident about skin
aid in research
05. What behavior change can we observe that tells us they’ve achieved their goal(s)?
sharing tips in the community or positive posts about skincare results
less anxiety and stress about bad skin/ skin problems
feel more comfortable with their knowledge and how to use products
05. User Outcomes and Benefits
After laying out the user outcomes and benefits, we then asked ourselves two questions: how are we solving the problem and what are we proposing? We did an activity and individually sketched six unique solutions (interfaces) to our questions.
After we were done sketching, we came together and discussed the sketches we created.
After we finished discussing all of our sketches, we then began individually sketching a user flow for a solution we all agreed to be important.
The user flow I decided to sketch out is the user flow for the initial questionnaire feature.
Overlapping Ideas
While doing this activity, we realized we had some overlapping ideas:
Skincare check-in routine
Scan barcode -> product information page
The product information page has pictures, descriptions, and community reviews & discussions
Community discussion board/page
Step-by-step guide with photos
06. User Outcomes and Benefits
Now we have the question of what do we test first? How do we narrow down this huge feature list?
We created a chart that helped us come up with hypothesis statements.
After we wrote each hypothesis, we sorted them out from most to least risky.
07. Hypothesis Prioritization
What's the most important thing we need to learn first? Out of all the features we have, which ones are the most and least risky? This table shows the most risk feature to the lowest risk feature, starting from up and then going down.
Minimum Viable Product aka Experiment Design
We then looked at our top 5 hypotheses independently and started to discuss how we might validate an assumed behavior we would like to see in our user. Some questions we asked ourselves were:
What behavioral assumption are you looking to validate of your persona?
How could you create a scrappy environment that augments that experience for the user? (think of tools you currently have at your disposal)
⤑ Hypothesis 1: We will achieve search engine optimization of skin care products if Taylor can be more educated before purchasing products with a scanning barcode feature that helps quickly view products on the go
Questionnaire?
How often do they search for product details
How much do they value convivence/impact the shopping experience
How confident they feel when shopping
Asking if the user has/uses a scanning kiosk
⤑ Hypothesis 2: We will achieve becoming an educational platform if Taylor can learn more about the ingredients in each skincare product with a product page
Do you know skincare ingredients?
What are the first few things looked at when researching
How often do they read skincare labels?
How often do they research skincare?
What keywords do they look for when researching?
⤑ Hypothesis 3: We will achieve consistent discussions within the app if Taylor can engage with the skincare community with a community discussion feature
How often use commenting ft. (how often they currently post)
How often view or participate in online forums
Ask how likely they are to read reviews
How often do they leave reviews
A survey by how often they read reviews/influence decision
⤑ Hypothesis 4: We will achieve initial usage of the app if Taylor can learn about the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of their current skincare routine with a feature that allows users to upload their current skincare routine
Asking how often they watch/save product reviews
How often research skincare and general products
Asking how they pick their routine or compare it to others
How many products are currently used?
Ask about current knowledge related to skincare, rate their expertise
⤑ Hypothesis 5: We will achieve consistent discussions within the app if Taylor can engage with the skincare community with a community discussion feature
How they feel about questionnaires, gage their interest
Do they take mini quizzes on other apps
How stressful finding skincare is for them, interested in personalized skincare?
Do you enjoy custom content?
Interest? Success Rate?
08. Product Backlog
After this, we created our sprint 1 backlog which includes everything we plan on building and testing in our first sprint.
Sprint 1
Low-Mid Fidelity Prototyping
We officially started Sprint 1 by tackling the wireframe of the scanner and initial questionnaire features. We wanted to test if users would be drawn to the scanner feature so we created two low-mid fidelity prototype variations of the interface.
One with a scanner and one without the scanner. Below are the wireframes that we created:
User Interviews & Affinity Mapping
Each week, the team conducted three user interviews to gain insight into user's needs and opinions. We created moderated scripts each week and every time there was a new feature we needed to test. I moderated the first three user interviews that we did.
The user tests consist of context scenarios that are related to the feature that we are testing. We usually had multiple variations and context scenarios (max. 3) to see how users interacted with each test and which one they gravitated to the most. We ended each test with post questions.
During each interview, whoever is not moderating the interview is instructed to take notes. After each interview, we collected our notes and transferred them into sticky notes that we then put on an affinity map.
Stand Ups
We had stand-up meetings three times a week where we discussed any progress, concerns, or questions we may have. This allowed the team to be on track and on the same page with everything regarding the project. Although we had mandatory 3 stand-ups a week, there were times where impromptu meetings were needed.
Sprint 2
Reevaluation
During sprint 2, we realized that we needed to make changes to our persona. We decided that having just one persona was enough and decided to ultimately keep our Taylor persona but add a few traits, needs, and obstacles as well as change her age to 22 because we felt the demographic we are attracting is around that age.
User Interviews
Starting Sprint 2, we focused on preparing for our user interviews. This time we focused on the initial questionnaire feature and created a beginner variation and intermediate variation of the questionnaire. We were testing to see which questionnaire users gravitated toward and their overall behavior towards questionnaires. We were also tested to see if they liked the results that the questionnaire gave them.
Test Goals
Do they want to take the questionnaire?
What helpful information do they get from the questionnaire?
Beginner vs. Intermediate Questionnaire
Questionnaire Goals
Educational (Skin Type, etc.)
Product recommendation
High-Fidelity Prototype
We focused a lot on making our low-mid-fidelity prototype into a high-fidelity prototype. We came together to discuss visuals such as colors, fonts, styles, and the overall feel of the app. We made sure to all be on the same page before we went on our own to work on screens as well as come together as much as we could to work together on the prototype.
Project Overview
Back to our problem space:
The current state of skincare has focused primarily on users’ skin types and overusing buzzwords.
What existing products/services fail to address is the issue of ingredients in skincare products.
Our product/service will address this gap by providing accurate usage of the product through information and guides.
Our initial focus will be users who want a quick fix to learn about skincare/beginner users.
We'll know we are successful when we see the amount of activity measured on the platform.
Our solution is creating a skincare app where you can access educational content on the go about any skincare product as well as create custom skincare routines and have personalized skincare routines generated for you!
Other Inclusions
Since the time we had worked on their prototype was only 8 weeks, there are still so many things I wish we could have included in our final prototype. Such as:
Discussion Board where users can post threads asking for skincare advice and help others with their skincare needs
Reviews Page where users can have a notifications center for review interactions and see past reviews
Compare and Contrast feature included in the scanner and search bar
Favorites Page
Conclusion
After 8 weeks of working on this project, I can say that I have learned a lot from this experience.
I learned and created a whole application with an entirely new methodology called Lean UX. The pace of Lean UX is so fast, that I had to learn how to interact and communicate with a team thoroughly so we can reach our deadlines and goals. I also learned how to take user feedback to incorporate it to make a prototype that can be an even better solution than it was previously
Overall, I feel like I have learned so much from this experience and I am so proud of the prototype we were able to create in such a short amount of time!