We participated in the L’Oréal Brandstorm 2021 competition and the theme this year is “Invent the Beauty Shopping Experience through Entertainment”. The problem we observed in this competition is that Male customers are not very engaged in skincare and the male skincare market share always remains low.
Our initial design goal was to use the “Entertainment” concept to make male customers more engaged in skincare and improve the overall skincare experience. And here's our solution:
"An enjoyable skincare experience that increases male users' engagement and reduces confusions."
Users can scan their faces anytime, anywhere, to know their skin status. By doing so they will receive a skin report after scanning, it tells users what skin problems they might have. Thus it improves users' situational awareness of their skin.
The technology can be supported by Modiface, a L'Oréal company.
Users will get customized tips to help them solve their skin problems after scanning face. They can also find many articles and tips on different skincare topics. This will help reduce the confusions for male users when it comes to skincare.
Users will collect coins when scanning their faces and making progress in skincare. Then they can use those coins to redeem rewards. This will motivate users to scan their faces routinely and take care of their skin.
Every scanning will be recorded in the history. It allows users to keep a record of their skin condition changes and helps them to develop a daily habit.
We conducted user survey and interviews to try to understand more about the problem. The things we were trying to figure out include:
Who are our users?
How's their current skincare experience?
What are some pain points in current experience?
What are their goals and needs?
From our research, we found that our target users are mostly adult men age between 18 - 49. And here are some key characteristics of our users:
Based on our research, we were able to build two types of persona to explore our users’ different needs and goals. We call them Purposeful Users and Passive Users.
We also developed journey map to look at users emotion flow and pain points in current skincare experience. And we found that Laziness, Lack of skincare knowledge and unenjoyable skincare experience are key pains.
For purposeful users, the pains are mostly in the stage of figuring out the skin problems and solutions; However, for passive users, pains are almost across the whole experience.
From our study on users, we were able to summarize their goals, problems and needs step by step. From the two types of users we concluded 3 typical user needs, which lead to 3 design opportunities for us to improve the ultimate skincare experience.
Based on all the insights from our research, we decided to redefine the design goal to guide us to solve the problem better.
"Design an enjoyable skincare experience to help male users be more engaged and less confused. So that they can develop a good habit of maintaining their skin health."
With the redefined design goal, we benchmarked on some other apps to see how they approached to solve these kind of problems and to get inspirations. We wanted to know firstly, how to make the experience more educational; Secondly, how to motivate users to develop a habit; Thirdly, how to make the experience more interesting. And here's some of our key findings.
Inspired by these apps, we did a brainstorm session to explore a good way to solve the problems. Then we evaluated these ideas based on Impact and Effort. And we picked up those ideas with high impact and low effort to explore their potentials.
After that, we converged all the potential ideas into 3 main ideas. And we tested each idea with 3 of our interview participants and collected their thoughts.
Users find the idea of face scanning with recommended tips is interesting and helpful. This can save them a lot of time doing research to figure out the problems and solutions. However, they also mentioned that it would be better if we can add more motivation in it.
Users think the idea of gamification with reward sounds fun. But it’s kind of irrelevant to skincare and users can always go directly for the game instead of doing skincare. It can also be too distracting for some users.
Some users think the idea of recording skincare steps and using social influence to motivate people helpful. But others think it’s basic and can be more interesting.
Based on the feedback on our 3 ideas, we had discussion and reached to an agreement to combined some of the ideas and design a new system that can be fun, educational and motivative. We hope this will form a positive circle that’ll help them develop a good skincare habit and maintain skin health.
To make sure our solution is feasible, we also did some research on the technology support and we found the face scanning technology can be provided by Modiface, A l’oreal company.
Then we created some low-fidelity screens to test out better designs for our ideas before we directly jumped into building final designs. And we made some iterations in the initial step to better guide us in the final design.
In previous design, users will see the scanning camera once they open the app. Because we wanted to encourage users to scan their face. And they can only see their report after scanning. But in our testing, users said seeing the camera once they open the app can make them feel losing control, and there was no way to access their previous skin report. So we placed a primary button that says scan and now Users will only see the scanning camera when they tap the scan button. And they can always access the previous report under the history section.
Then we are trying to figure out how the scanning system works. We firstly thought about limiting scanning at once a day. So that they can only get coins once a day. And it makes it easier to manage their skin history. However, our users mentioned they will have very different skin conditions within one day. Plus, if their scanning results are affected by other factors. For example, light or angles. And they were not given a chance to get more precise scanning for that day. And it could be frustrating. So, we got rid of the scanning once a day limit. Users can scan as many times as they want. They will get the most updated skin scanning report and an average skin score for the day. But they will only receive the coins the first time they scan in one day.
From wireframes we moved to high fidelity mock-ups. We built the first version on Figma and had testing on our users. Here is our first version of design.
We used the hi-fi design to do some testing on the users, and we received a lot of feedbacks. Based on them, we did some iterations on the hi-fi mock-ups.
Firstly, when designing the skin history page, we found the histogram is not a good way to show the changes within a day. Also it could not precisely show the results when users scan multiple times in a short period of time. So we switched to line chart, and added grid to make the chart more readable and precise.
Next, we found that the design was not effective enough for users to browse the content and find the content that they want. So the solution is to categorized content into different topics and add a topic filter. We also added the “helpful rate” and trending section to help users better browse the feed.
Then, participants felt that they didn’t get enough information about the products and the check out experience felt too perfunctory. So we made a more completed check out experience and added more information to help users make easier decisions when choosing a product.
Lastly, to make the skincare tips more helpful, we added a comment and rating function. Now users can get more personal perspectives. The rating also helps customize what content is suitable for users. Besides, it can add more interactions and increase engagement.
We redesigned the hi-fi mock-ups with all the iterations, and here's the final L'Oréal Homme experience.
We won the Top 50 Team (out of 1534 teams) in the competition.
More user testings and iterations on skin report.
We woould do more user testings and iterations especially on skin report. Because we wanna know what information about skin our users desire the most.
Explore social function to help users learn from each other.
We also wanted to explore the social function in the app to allow users to communicate and learn from each other.
Promoting L’Oréal products.
We wanted to explore chances to promote l’areal products for example in the recommended tips. Thus to have a profitable impact on the brand.
