My Role
UX Lead
Information Architect
Prototyper
Support to Research
and Usability Testing
Timeframe
3 weeks // Oct 2020
Tools Used
Adobe XD
Adobe Illustrator
Draw.io
Figma
Google Forms
Miro
Trello
Don't feel like reading?
FELOH
For Everyone's Love of Hair
(+ Beauty)
FELOH (pronounced "fellow") is a one-of-a-kind social marketplace for hair care and beauty. When you’re socially active on FELOH (posting content, making product reviews, etc.), you’ll earn cash to go towards beauty purchases in the FELOH marketplace.
The FELOH marketplace is the ultimate hub where beauty brands list their products to sell. You can also search the platform for the latest trends, styles, and products for all your hair and beauty needs.
A UX “facelift” to the FELOH Marketplace as the client felt the platform looked rather antiquated. The hope was to have a sleek, new-age feel that would appeal to Millenials and Gen-Zers. The goal is to elevate the design to reflect FELOH’s creative and fun brand.
"We don't want FELOH to get lost in the sauce."
-Camille, Chief Visionary Officer/Founder at FELOH
The video above showcases the current FELOH application
In a team of 4, we delivered a design package that included a logo and icon redesign, a high-fidelity prototype Camille can take to her development team, recommendations for their navigational structure, as well as a research packet that shows our findings from our survey, task analysis, and usability testing.
RESEARCH
What makes FELOH unique is that it's both a social application and a shoppable marketplace. Because we only had 3 short weeks we focused our efforts on the mobile marketplace aspect of the application while another team focused on the social side.
To uncover customer habits and pain points our research lead sent out an initial survey that yielded 22 responses to uncover where people are currently buying hair & beauty products and what helps them confidently purchase those products.
Using that data we were able to pinpoint FELOH's direct and indirect competitors and this would also later help us to develop our persona who you will meet a little further down in this case study.
When a competitive and comparative analysis was done we saw that FELOH checks almost all the boxes when it comes to ideal features for a social marketplace app to have its mark in its respective field. However, due to its wide reach in both the social experience and the marketplace, FELOH’s comparative analysis shows room for improvement for marketplace-specific features, such as shipping options.
IN SHORT: FELOH has the features it needs but why weren't more people using the application?
We uncovered that
FELOH users need:
Thanks to our research, we were able to develop our persona Michaela who represents our FELOH users. We wanted to be sure to keep her in mind throughout our entire UX process.
A navigable and secure way to shop in the marketplace that encourages her to view, share, and confidently purchase beauty products.
To create an easily navigable and secure marketplace where the user can intuitively discover their desired product(s) and have an understanding of the reward system to encourage further engagement on FELOH.
We believe that this will enable users to have a sense of confidence, findability, and security throughout their experience in the FELOH Marketplace application.
DESIGN
Working with Camille and the social team I wanted us to pinpoint what are the most important things our FELOH users immediately needed to access. I didn't just want to create a navigation that worked only for the marketplace but global navigation that would be present all throughout the app no matter if you were on the social or marketplace side of FELOH.
Current FELOH Navigation
New proposed global FELOH navigation wireframe
Current Product Category Dropdown Menu
Our task analysis revealed users became frustrated while trying to find something as simple as shampoo. Besides the lack of a search bar, my assumption was how products were categorized on FELOH might be the culprit.
Wanting to understand how our users would categorize FELOH products I lead an Open Card Sort with 5 participants with 185 FELOH products
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Now that we understood how our users sorted FELOH products, I was able to propose an updated sitemap to reflect the changes. The addition of the subcategories created a more robust sitemap.
Please use the orange slider to see FELOH's current sitemap (left) and my proposed future state sitemap (right)
FELOH USER FLOW
Wanting to understand where we could eliminate redundancies and view pain points I put myself in a customer's shoes and went through the FELOH check out process.
Key Takeaway:
Navigating through the FELOH app I accidentally ended up purchasing a bottle of shampoo because there was no order review page after I entered my Paypal information. Don't worry the product ended up being fantastic but this initially created a small sense of panic that I would never want any customer to feel.
Please use the orange slider to see the current (left) and proposed user flow (right)
One of FELOH's greatest and most enticing features was its reward system. Where anytime you write a post, upload an image/video, or shop in the marketplace you get "FELOH dollars" to then spend for future purchases in the marketplace. Currently, it wasn't highlighted or even properly understood by FELOH users.
FELOH's current reward page is vague and does not explain how to get more FELOH dollars.
Can only see rewards applied after you've completed Step 1-5 of the checkout process.
"I was told I received $10.00 in FELOH $, but beneath that, it said it equaled $1.00. Then, when I went to checkout, it said it equaled $0.10. I found this to be misleading and unclear"
-Frustrated FELOH user
ASKING FOR CLARIFICATION
When we asked our client how they envision the reward system to work they expressed instead of FELOH Dollars it would now be called Curl Coins™ and we were given a breakdown on how the new reward system. They also expressed interest in creating a special icon just for the rewards.
FELOH had an existing color palette and logo that we worked with to create our initial designs.
In our task analysis, 3 out of 5 participants called out a problem with the FELOH logo describing it as: confusing, hard to read and, not reflective of FELOH's brand and mission.
CURL COIN™ ICON
With the reward system defined I designed an icon that was familiar yet fun and would hopefully entice users to select it to learn more.
NEW FELOH LOGO
I wanted to design a logo that was readable but still representative of FELOH's fun brand while also paying homage to their current logo
DESIGN STUDIO SESSIONS
I led various design studio sessions with 2 other UX designers. We explored various aspects of the layout. Consulted with the client, social team and grabbing inspiration from established brands.
Usability Testing our minimum viable product
Key takeaways:
NAVIGATION BAR DESIGN ITERATION
We explored removing the gradient and using just one color to not distract users from FELOH content but to also give a more clean look.
FELOH LANDING PAGE DESIGN ITERATIONS
In our first prototype (left) users were not seeing products right away. Instead, they would first have to select a category to then see products. In our updated version because we allow you to horizontal scroll on the categories we are able to showcase products you can now vertically scroll. If you clicked the category name it would take you to all the products in that category.
LATEST PROTOTYPE USABILITY RESULTS
We tested our current version against 3 participants and asked them to complete the tasks below.
Scenario:
You heard about two new brands that are really worth trying out that are only available on the FELOH marketplace. You’re also curious about the Curl Coins reward system and what it means to be a V.I.F member.
Tasks:
On a scale of 1-10 (1 not secure, 10 being very secure) how secure do you feel using this app?
User 1: "8, No issues with security at all. Seemed like a legit checkout process. Liked that I could use PayPal."
User 2: "8! I like the colors, they were really fun "
User 3: "Solid 9 lol it looks like a real app"
NEXT STEPS
A NEW FELOH APPROACHES
Since we've completed this project we were excited to learn FELOH was the recipient of some investment capital from the Velocity Creative Accelerator. Version 2.0 of FELOH is scheduled to be rolled out in mid-2021 and we feel so proud to be able to contribute in a way to elevating the user experience of this new version. Even if all our designs may not make it to the final version we know we gave the client a lot to consider and we can't wait to see the final FELOH.
WHAT I LEARNED
Get in touch.
Can't wait to connect with you.
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