THE WORQ APP

RESEARCH

Inclusive beauty was the starting block, but developing the full mobile app took time and a lot of research. This topic is quite personal to many, so we approached our research with respect at top of mind. Our first step was conducting user interviews with eight individuals whom identified as POC and/or LGBTQ+, and had experience using any sort of makeup products. Our conversations were rich, informative, and even fun as we covered sources of beauty inspiration, feelings on representation, and how makeup informs each of our respondents’ daily lives.

Our goal was to gather as much information as we could in order to focus our process and really get to the heart of what our users needed and what values they championed the most. After rounds and rounds of affinity mapping, we saw our data coming together neatly. The trends and common sentiments we discovered across users developed into five key insights, which served as the foundation on which the rest of our ideation and design would be built.

KEY INSIGHTS

PERSONA

In order to personalize these insights and frame them in a perspective that would help us create a real and usable end product, our next step in our research was to develop our persona. Taylor became the center of our process, tying every decision we made back to them and how we were improving their experience. Identifying Taylor also helped us stay business-minded throughout our designing, as they represented a primary target market for our application and other existing companies within the beauty industry.

JOURNEY MAP

Now that we understood Taylor, their needs, and their pain points, we next had to contextualize these sentiments into a real world scenario. Developing a journey map of Taylor’s experience trying to learn a new makeup technique allows us to address what Taylor needs in a tangible way. We see their delight and frustration in real-time, revealing where the opportunity lies for our mobile app to enhance her experience. The red area at the end of the journey map? That’s our opportunity space.

IDEATE

With Taylor and an opportunity in mind, we began focusing our thinking more towards design. We stretched our research externally, looking at similar companies and applications that existed already. With inclusivity and learning in mind, we did an analysis on various beauty brands, apps, and stores in order to understand what user needs were being addressed, what features we could potentially utilize in our product, and any further insights we could gather about the existing beauty space. What we found was a surprising gap in the market for inclusive makeup apps that focus on learning techniques. That’s the space WORQ would occupy.

INCLUSIVE BEAUTY APP COMPETITOR/COMPARATOR ANALYSIS

KEY INSIGHTS TO DESIGN FEATURES

At this point, we got our bases covered — an established persona, an understanding of the competitive space, and a list of potential features to include. It was now time to put pen to paper and design studio our way to a first draft prototype. As I rapidly sketched out my ideas, I kept asking myself, if we built our mobile app, how would it help Taylor explore new makeup techniques? How would it make her more confident? How would it address her need for step by step learning?

After a long process of sketching, collaborating, iterating, and doing it all over again, we ultimately returned to our five key insights and used those to develop relevant design features that would address and solve for these user needs and pain points.

DESIGN

USABILITY TESTING

Before building out the final design, we went through a series of usability testing with our paper and mid-fidelity prototypes. While users easily navigated the flow from picking content to using the camera, the majority of users overlooked or were confused by the items in the bottom UI bar. We were also given the recommendation of having a way to save “favorite looks,” which we realized was an important feature to include. This feedback prompted us to address the information architecture of our app. We moved around navigation items and reorganized features on the camera screen.

Our hi-fidelity testing saw the success of these changes, but also revealed further areas for us to iterate on going forward. We found that all users couldn’t identify the main page CTA, two of three users were still confused by the AR, and all users wanted clearer step-by-step guidance on the screen. With this feedback, we changed the main page CTA from just an image to a clear button and built out a step-by-step flow overlay on the camera screen to help users utilize the AR capabilities and depend less on the additional help tools within the app.

DELIVER

While our hi-fidelity prototype was built out and tested, it was clear there was still more work to be done. From a design perspective, we had ample room to clean up the tutorial flows, integrate more features, and refine the UI. From a business perspective, there was also much to consider. During this process, we put on our business and marketing caps to plot the direction of what next logical steps we would take with this product.

For this application to be successful, we needed to guide our thinking beyond the user, as important as Taylor was to the process. What partnerships could we leverage that would benefit both parties equally? How were we quantitatively going to measure success in order to keep growing and improving our product?

BRAND PARTNERSHIP

All users we sat down with mentioned that they shop at Sephora for makeup products, and being a household name in beauty, they seemed like the perfect brand partnership. We analyzed the benefits of partnering with them, as well as how our WORQ app would benefit their business as well.

GOOGLE HEART FRAMEWORK: OKRS & METRICS

Using the Google HEART Framework to showcase relevant success metrics was the most logical way for us to understand quantitatively how users would be using the app and what numbers we’d be looking at in order to iterate and grow. With every new product, increasing sign up rate is extremely important, and in the long-term, improving the LTV (Lifetime Value) of a user is one of the top KPIs to be monitoring. At the end of the day, retention proves the satisfaction of both the business and the user.

Our goal when we set out developing WORQ was to create a space where people who identify by all races, genders, and sexualities can explore and enjoy makeup on their terms in a practical and comfortable way. Our goal for this app going forward would be to keep addressing our users’ needs and pain points in the world of makeup and beauty through innovation and digital solutions.

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