Find confidence, community and joy
DURATION: Sep - Oct 2021
ROLE: Product Designer
TYPE: Dedicated website
and a complementary mobile app
Project Overview
FLAIR is a responsive website that helps users find confidence, community, and joy through beauty and style tutorials. Users can sift through and discover the products and advice that actually "work".
The Problem
Adults and teenagers are causing substantial damage to their health, looks and wellbeing by following advice and browsing tutorials from amateur vloggers and bloggers on the social media circuit. People spending a lot of time researching or test-driving skincare and buying substandard products on the internet are rising nowadays.
The Goal
Introducing Flair, a web platform that lifts up diverse voices and celebrates the unique beauty found in each of us. The website will feature only the "reliable and workable beauty tutorials" from the brands and web as suggested by a group of certified experts in the beauty industry.
Preliminary Ideation
To quickly inquire about the pain points and needs, I conducted a semi-structured interview with four users. I coded the responses and analyzed them with an affinity diagram.
Research Insights
From the user interviews and research, I made several insights from user behaviours. These are some main points observed and learned during the questionnaire and research.
75 percentage of the people stated that they have found many online tutorials not effective or have purchased the wrong beauty products after referring to the tutorials
All participants stated that they search for beauty and skincare tutorials online
YouTube and Pinterest
For finding beauty tutorials, websites such as YouTube and Pinterest were the most popular
75 percentage of the people claimed they primarily browse through tutorials in their free time at home and primarily use laptop/PC
Meet the Users
NAME: Sandra
AGE: 28
LOCATION: Berlin
OCCUPATION: Architect
FAMILY: Lives with husband
Beauty is never persistent. I cannot find a good platform to get solutions for all my everyday beauty problems.
Sandra is an architect and is usually busy with many clients and has to travel a lot to attend on-site meetings. Her job expects her to maintain professionalism.
PAIN POINTS
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Information found online is vast
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Time consuming to watch long videos and tutorials
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Annoyed of skin problems while testing products
GOALS
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Get solutions for skin problems from experts
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Find tutorials as per the availability of products nearby
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Easy to search user interface
NAME: Ashraf
AGE: 22
LOCATION: Berlin
OCCUPATION: Student
FAMILY: Lives with parents
I usually watch women's beauty tutorials online to fix my skin problems. Resources for men are scarce.
Ashraf studies at a university and he is very much interested in fashion. He doesn't want to spend money in the salon, rather prefers to find effective tutorials.
PAIN POINTS
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Feels men's tutorials and resources for beauty & fashion are less
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Frustrated to find a solution for a certain problem
GOALS
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Wants to save money
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Prefers gender equality for beauty across platforms
Competitive Audit
I identified a few vital features from user surveys, which Flair should focus on to provide a better experience for the users. The following are a few of the observations from the audit
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I observed that most of the websites don't include reliable videos with expert advice.
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Sort and filter options that include beauty criteria can help save a lot of time for the users. Such facility is available but remains limited.
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The websites exclusively for beauty like ELLE & FASHION don't feature sufficient men's tutorials or trends.
Site Map
Final Designs
01.
Here is the landing page. It provides a glimpse of a summary of the tutorials, products and mission statement. Users can explore, search and find a lot more on the homepage.
02.
"Men's exclusive" features the best collection of tutorials to help them find suitable male-targeted products and solutions. Inclusivity and diversity are considered to be important aspects of Flair.
03.
Filter and sort options are formulated considering the unique requirements of the specific tutorial. Find the right tutorial as per your skin tone, product specification and much more in a short span.
04.
The user has the flexibility to watch the tutorial and find all the product details on the same page. The user can choose to buy the product online or check the availability at local stores nearby.
Style Guide
Takeaways
With a broad problem in hand, I needed to plan the research and design process in order to narrow it down to the core of the challenge. I'm glad that I had interviewed many people of different races and focused on gender equality. This helped me to understand many problems which I would not have thought about.
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I am proud of what I have created, but Flair is nowhere near finished. My design touched on the issues there but did not fully flesh out them. It would definitely be beneficial to add depth to the design and test the concepts out. These will be done as further steps.
