Safer Suds UX Case Study
Duration: 1 week | Role: Product Designer | Team: Individual Project|Tools Used: Figma & Google surveys | Methods Used: Empathy mapping, User interviews, Competitive analysis, Design system, Rapid prototyping
Problem
The beauty industry can be overwhelming with so many products available. With this, there are loads of ingredients used in these bottles that consumers don’t know how to pronounce or understand its actual effects to the skin. In fact,“Under the law, cosmetic products and ingredients do not need FDA premarket approval, with the exception of color additives.'“ It isn’t a question if consumers are being taken advantage of by companies preying on their lack of awareness.
Purpose
To demystify the complicated ingredients listed in toiletries and household beauty products by giving them simple definitions, color coding each one based on its potential irritants, and highlighting clean products to alternatively use. Safer Suds has the opportunity to empower consumers by leveraging user education.
Challenges
Simplifying complicated information
The list of ingredients can be extraneous. For time purposes, the app will have to cover the most commonly misconceived ingredients on the market and avoid clutter in the UI.
Proper labeling
Users need to glance at the bio of a product to determine if a product is a potential irritant to their skin or not. To design for this, the ingredients need to be intuitively color coded and categorized to ensure on the go use of the app.
User education
For the average user, most of this information will be foreign to them. There will have to be supplemental blog posts to guide and engage the user without overwhelming them.
Discover
Combining preliminary research and user interviews led me lay a foundation for the solutions Safer Suds aims to bring to the table.
After these interviews I asked myself:
How do I educate users in a non-overbearing way?
How do I convince people not actively seeking change in their regimen that having better ingredients in their products can be affordable and not a hassle?
How do I make the process of viewing and comparing products simple enough to be primed for on-the-go experiences?
Competitive Research
I did some market research on the existing digital products that help clarify the ingredient’s usefulness in a product to identify how Safer Suds would stand out in the market.
CosDNA
Think Dirty.
EWG Skin Deep
Pain Points I have noticed in these common resources are:
UI is not easy on the eyes. Tables are clunky and need better labeling formats.
Definitions for most common irritants are not straight-forward and simplified to educate the user.
Poor filtering options if the user is exploring products
Does not include informative blog posts to better support the user in their research.
Sketch
I drafted out a user journey to understand the task flow of a user that would log onto Safer Suds. This was an effective way to order the sequence of the screens for logical sense.
Areas to improve based on feedback received from prototype
Filters
Roughly 60% of users experienced a pain point when trying to find a product they knew vaguely about or when refining their explore page.
Solution - I added specific filters to help narrow down this search and save time.
Buyer conversions
I timed how long it would take the user to search for a product (without them knowing), analyze the ratings, and decide if the product was worth purchasing. Users took roughly three minutes to complete this task.
Solution - I added a scan feature to save time and eliminate the need to manually enter in a product’s information.
I added an overall rating to the product based on the averages of the ingredient’s irritant level on the skin.
Both of these solutions prime the app to be optimized for an on-the-go experience, decreases cart abandonment, and caters to the young mobile-user demographic.
Conclusion
Seeing opportunities to question the status quo is an exciting challenge. Completing this project allowed me to gain insights into an unregulated billion dollar valued industry. This poses a risk to consumers and I want to continue doing projects that empowers them instead.
Improvements to be made in the future for this design:
Collaborating with companies to be featured in the app to boost revenues
Personalized article recommendations
Customer ratings feature to form a community around Safer Suds