Lush
A retrospective on Curate — a new feature for Lush
For the 4th project of GA’s User Experience Design Immersive, my classmates and I were tasked with coming up with our own project plan for a brand of our choice. I took on the role of Project Manager for the 2-week design sprint. We were given the freedom to explore an area of opportunity within an existing brand. We combined the skills we’re already practiced, such as user research, competitive analysis, sketching & wireframing, and prototyping & testing with new activities, such as researching technical constraints, writing & developing a proposal, and presenting in the form of a final client meeting.
As project manager, I wanted to make sure we had a productive 2-weeks, and that our team was on the same page when it came to our deliverables and due dates within the 2-week period.
After an afternoon of exploring a variety of brands and problems, my team and I decided on a combination of our common interests — toxin-free beauty products, social sustainability, and product discovery.
Our objective was to build a feature on the iOS mobile application for Lush that will allow users to curate products based on their concern (or ailment) combined with the ingredients of their choice all while staying environmentally and socially conscious.
Executive Summary
Over the course of 2 weeks, our 3-person User Experience design team, set out to develop a new feature for Lush’s mobile application, called Curate. Curate will allow Lush users to find the product of their dreams. Curate also speaks to the Lush user who is informative, socially and environmentally conscious and desires to have a pleasant on-line shopping experience.
Once we had decided our problem area and brand, we were ready to tackle the research component of our project.
Problem Statement
More and more people are becoming aware of the toxins that exist in the every-day products they use. How can we build an easier navigation for users to search for products that suit their specific needs while being informed of the Lush’s robust product information in a digestible way?
Since we derived our own problem and brand — it was up to us to determine the research methods and path forward. We started by extensively researching the brand, its history, existing mobile, web, and social media presence, as well as Lush’s competitors and comparable brands.
About Lush
Lush Ltd. is a cosmetic retailer founded by Mark Constantine and Liz Weir. They started by selling their natural product formulas to The Body Shop but eventually decided to branch out and sell their own products via Lush. Products for face, hair and body contains ingredients that are strictly vegetarian or vegan and are completely handmade. Lush concentrates on three categories: animal protection, human rights and environmental conservation.
We chose Lush because of their core values and mission. Their website and mobile application had an immense amount of information for each and every product, in addition to how they’re products are made and were the ingredients come from. However, due to the overwhelming amount of information, it was not quickly digestible for the on-the-go user.
We took a look at how a user might look actually search for products on Lush’s mobile application on iOS. We wanted to look at 2 different avenues — searching for a product based on a concern (i.e. oily ski) and searching for a product based on ingredient (i.e. rose oil).
We had validated our initial assumptions — the products exist at Lush, however it’s difficult for the conscious user to actually find them!
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
We decided to take a look a look at Lush’s direct competitors and comparable brands to see how others were approaching product discovery.
We looked into 5 competitors of Lush, other brands that sell body care products. We found some things we really liked — like Fresh’s clear ‘Shop By’ categories, and things we didn’t like — difficult navigation of The Body Shop’s mobile application
For comparable brands, we chose 3 that are dedicated to creating a more sustainable earth — Reformation and Everlane are both environmentally conscious clothing brands, and Whole Foods is all about where they source their products, as well as caring about packaging and food waste.
Contextual Inquiry
After getting a good sense of Lush as a brand through it’s mobile and web presence, along with comparable brands, we decided to visit our local Lush store near Union Square.
It was here we had a sort of ‘ah-ha’ moment: we wanted our mobile feature to feel similarly to the warm energy of the story — complete with detailed product information and friendly customer assistance. We wanted to bring the in-store experience on-line through our mobile application.
After our trip to the store, we set out to analyze all the research we had at this point gathered into a topic map to aid with the design process later.
User Screening & Interviews
Before we interviewed users in detail, we created a screener survey for the following reasons:
- demographics of users who aware of toxins in everyday beauty products
- platform usage (laptop and mobile)
- habits & behaviors when shopping for beauty products
We received a total of 47 responses and selected to further interview 10 people.
The interviews validated a few things for our team — the majority of our users’ care about information of products before purchasing, they purchase according to need or concern, they are environmentally and socially conscious, and most use their phones to look up products.
Technical Constraints
After validation of our mobile application choice, we re-visited research on Lush as a brand, in regards to their technical constraints in its APIs, and possible design solutions.
Since the Lush mobile app currently exists on iOS and Android, we took a look at Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and Google’s Material Design for Android. The HIG’s aim is improve the user’s experience by making all application interfaces more intuitive, learnable, and consistent. Google’s Material Design is a comprehensive design language for visual, motion, and interaction design across non-Apple devices.
With the research and user interviews under our belts, we were ready to map our takeaways and move closer to a prototype.
Affinity Diagraming
Our team took phrases, direct quotations, and other comments from our user interviews and wrote them down on colored post-its. We then combined all the takeaways and began to map them according to different themes to help us get closer to design elements within our product.
We were able to narrow down on some key statements about our users.
Users like to research and test their products before purchasing.
They rely on reviews and trusted sources (like friends, family, beauty bloggers) before purchasing.
They want to filter products based on their concerns and by ingredients.
Most are environmentally conscious and want to know what goes into their products and how it is made.
They crave routine-based products.
From our previous research, user interviews and mapping, our personas started to come together and evolved from the needs and goals of our users.
We wanted our personas to represent Lush’s diverse demographic and hold true to the pains and pleasures of our user interviewees and screener results.
We had finished our main research and planning components and were ready to take on design!
Feature Prioritization
With our problem statement in mind — we brainstormed as a team different features our mobile app addition would have. We wanted users to be able to customize or curate their shopping experience, while being able to clearly navigate through the product details and ingredient information, and bring a level of interaction into the app, and have users feel like they are in the vibrant Lush store. These 3 main points became our design goals and helped guide feature ideation.
We used a method called MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won’t) to figure out what exactly our feature would do.
After having a sense of the priorities for our feature, we decided to compare them by assessing each feature’s impact versus the effort it would take to build.
It was during the feature prioritization, where our team had the second ‘ah-ha’ moment. Curate! Our feature would be able to customize the product discovery process for users in an interactive and informative way. Lush users could filter by ingredient and concern/ailment according to their desires. This would create for a fun, easily navigable way for users to find the product of their dreams and get some useful pairings and information — all core to Lush’s mission along the way.
With our excitement flourishing, we jumped right into figuring out how exactly this would all look and come together.
Design Studio
We sketched out different screens from the home, main feature, Curate, category and product details individually, and then as a team, we collaborated and pulled together the best from each.
Throughout our research and into ideation, we realized that the home screen of Lush’s mobile app wasn’t optimized, so we decided to make a few changes, like highlight their videos (to make it more interactive), add a best sellers section (since our users wanted trusted opinions), and re-work the global navigation to reflect shopping by ingredient and concern.
Prototype
We were ready to raise the fidelity and digitize our designs and begin to see how users will interact with the new feature through usability testing.
Design Iterations
We made changes from our usability testing and tested with 5 users who pointed out the areas of improvement for our design.
We raised the fidelity a second time and tested our design again for more feedback.
Annotated Mock-Ups
Clickable iOS Prototype
Click here for the link to our final prototype.
Next Steps
As a team, we decided on a list of things we would pursue if we were to continue with Curate.
Final Thoughts
This was my first time as project manager, and it reminded me a lot of previous work experience I had leading a time. It was a great vision mapping, designing, researching, and collaborating with my incredible teammates. I am so grateful to have led such a talented team and deliver a really dynamic final product.
Through our client presentation, we were able to gain experience in presenting our ideas and work in a realistic meeting scenario. Our client was tough and asked a lot of great questions, while probing for our reasoning. We were able to gracefully justify our design recommendations, while also taking in their critiques and bettering our processes as designers through their feedback.
