CLEAN SLATE
Intentional Everyday Skincare
A skin health education and habit-building app helps people take better care of their skin.
What is Skin Slate?
Skin Slate is a skincare app curates routines, products and insights catered to your lifestyle and skin type. With the assistance of skin profile analysis, tracker, and customizable skincare nudges, users can learn to better manage their skin health on a daily basis.
*This is a conceptual project completed as part of my design portfolio.
Project type
Concept project
2-week sprint
My role
Project Manager
UX/UI Design
Visual Design
Usability Testing
Tools
Figma
Zepelin
Zoom
What we did
With a 4-person team, my team and I created a modern solution that takes the headache out of skincare, including
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Provide preventative and actionable skincare tips
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Empower people with more control of their skin health and daily routine
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Discover accessible skin health knowledge and resources
01. Skincare Nudge
Integrated with iOS native Health and weather apps, skincare nudge delivers customizable preventative and actionable care tips to help users meet their skincare goals.
Why: We learned that one of the biggest hurdles for users to take care of their skin was the lack of actionable skin health tips to help them get ahead of UV rate, stress, and all the factors that affect their skin conditions.
02. Skin Health Tracker
A skin health tracker and dashboard with bite-sized and actionable insights that better cater to your skin type, your needs and your lifestyle. No more stress on trying to figure out what’s causing your skin to react.
Why: We learned that it's not always easy to create a new habit unless users are incentivized to do so and/or can see a direct impact. We knew we'd have to create some sort of validation and digital representation of each user's progress, to encourage them to have a consistent skincare regimen.
03. A new hub of accurate educational resources
A content library to learn about skin conditions, treatments, and product suggestions that have the best compatibility with your skin type. See condensed ingredient information, product compatibility with skin type, and relevant reviews from same skin type users.
Why: We learned that people discovered new skincare regimens and products online but are frustrated with the number of resources online—sometimes conflicting—and didn't know which to trust to get started.
My team and I were able to bring intentional moments of everyday skincare by delivering a personalized experience that solved our users’ biggest needs — but how exactly did we get here?
Read more about the research and design process below ⬇️
INITIAL BELIEFS AND ASSUMPTIONS
How did people approach skincare?
To guide our focus, we had a few beliefs about the problem space we wanted to validate from the research. For example,
USER RESEARCH & SYNTHESIS
Getting to the root of the problem
To substantiate our assumptions, we conducted 5 remote interview with particiapnts who are interested in skin health education. Our objective was to capture actionable insights that will further inform our solutions.
Key takeaways:
An overwhelming amount of information and products out there leads to confusion and stress in trying to maintain healthy skin on a daily basis. How might we help users better understand their skin needs to relieve the stress that comes with maintaining healthy skin?
With this insight, our goal was to develop an MVP that helps users better understand their skin needs on a daily basis and reduce the stress from managing healthy skin.
PERSONA
Who are we designing for?
We summarized our research and the needs, challenges, and goals of our target audience by creating a single, fictitious "persona.”
Meet Jamie! 👋 who reminded us of who the user is and focus our design and development efforts on solving the user’s problems.
JOURNEY MAP
What do users need?
From Jamie’s journey, her emotional journey decreases as she is overwhelmed by the amount of skincare information she finds. She needs sources to guide her in creating a personalized regimen that is effective for her.
Key takeaways
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We needed to help users meet individual skincare goals.
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We needed to motivate users to stay consistent with their care regimens.
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We needed to curate and share skin health knowledge.
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We needed to provide customizable tips for both internal (diets, stress, hormone, etc) and external changes (seasons, locations, air pollution, etc).
DEFINE & IDEATIONS
Prioritizing most-needed features
We took the core insights we learned and began the feature prioritization process, then distilled our many ideas down to only the most critical ones that would solve Jamie's challenges.
We wanted our designs to accomplish four main goals:
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Empower users to stay consistent with their care regimens
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Recommend products/articles to help users meet individual skincare goals
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Help users enjoy taking care of their skin by creating moments of delight and self-care
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Provide customizable tips for both internal (diets, stress, hormone, etc) and external changes (seasons, air pollution, etc)
MID-FIDELITY → HI-FIDELITY USER TESTING
Testing our proposed solutions
In order to see if our product was helpful to users, we went through two rounds of usability testing, with a total of 20 users. We gathered feedback and made revisions to address problem areas. Below are the major areas for improvement we collected from our users:
01. “These icons are too similar...”
02. “Why do I need to create a weather or delight notification?”
03. “Why do you ask about my gender?”
04. “I'd like to have the ability to save and share articles with my F&F.”
Introducing... Clean Slate
With the feedback we received from our final usability test, many interactions were made to the UI to giving more breathing room to the information, establish a strong brand across all screens, and prioritize what features are most important to the users.
NEXT STEPS & REFLECTION
Looking forward, looking back...
I wanted to tackle skin health problems through a concept project because I struggled with taking care of my skin growing up. I knew how skin health impacts one's confidence level. Here are the key takeaways I learned from this project:
Be cautious about UX writing
One of the biggest challenges I had was learning how to build positive messaging throughout the app so users feel encouraged and motivated to continue caring for their skin health.
Don’t make users do the work
Users mentioned that they did not always have the time or want to spend time deciphering a chart. They are using an app to make their lives easier, not add more work to their plate. If I had more time to work on this project, this would be the first thing I tackle.
People need incentives
Yes, this was a big insight that we designed our product around, but it still sits with me as a larger takeaway for all UX design. People want to be able to see their progress and impact and visualize the change they're making. Better yet, they want to be rewarded for this—whether that's through recognition or even monetarily. There are a lot of opportunities for gamification and data visualization that I will remember as I approach new UX projects.
@ Peggy Lu 2023