I had the privilege of working with a fantastic team at both The Barbarian Group and Clinique to create the first two releases of the Clinique Skin Care and Makeup Consultant app.
Goal
The goal of the app is to provide Clinique wearers with personalized advice, product recommendations and easy access to Clinique consultants to help them manage and maintain beautiful skin at any age.
Approach
The team conducted a series of workshops with the client to define the app. We presented our initial concepts using rough wireframes to welcome client feedback.
These early workshops helped both teams agree on a feature set for the first release.
Phase 1
Upon launching the app for the first time, the user is invited to record her skin type and concerns.
Setting preferences personalizes the app content. The user can revise preferences in her app settings.
She receives personalized daily tips, polls and quizzes based on her skin type and concerns.
A daily weather report helps her tailer her skin care regiment to her location.
Weather forecast pulldown reveals information and advice on how to manage your skin based on conditions such as UV, humidity and/or extreme temperatures.
The product tracker is a section of the app that was built for the launch of Clinique Smart serum. It is scalable to include additional products for future app releases based on performance of the Smart tracker during the first launch.
The mobile chat feature gives her personalized advice on the go from a certified Clinique consultant.
The consultant chat icon is persistent from the app header. She can view options for how to contact a Clinique consultant. Consultants can point her to recommended products based on her concerns within the chat. Chat transcripts are saved so the user can reference old chats and shop for products.
We built a prototype and conducted user testing. Based on the insights we gained from the user testing sessions, we decided on vital changes to make in dev for the first release and documented the remaining changes for the second release.
Phase 2
We applied analytics to the first release and used App Store reviews to gather additional insights. Through all our methods, we received valuable feedback such as:
Users did not find the tracker valuable, mainly because they found it too difficult to take good, consistent photos
They loved the weather forecast and wanted more content around managing skin care in difficult weather conditions
Users wanted to see makeup content in addition to skin care
More personalized product recommendations and opportunities to purchase Clinique products
Consultant chat is the most important feature for our users
Quizzes and polls are a big hit and users wanted more
Based on these insights, the team regrouped internally for a number of brainstorming sessions. We quickly sketched out our favorite concepts so we could roughly scope the new features and decide which ones we would present to Clinique for phase 2 feature proposals.
We then conducted another round of workshops with the client to improve on the features from the current release and evaluate new features to build for the second release. The following screens represent some of the new and improved features that came from our brainstorming, sketching and scoping sessions that we proposed to Clinique:
PREFERENCES: The app can leverage AR to make a smart skin tone match to Clinique foundation swatches. Hair and eye color information helps the app make the best recommendations for eye makeup.
BEFORE/AFTER PHOTO: Optimize photo taking with task based instructions, flash improved lighting, varying guides and AR facial recognition for alignment.
PALETTE BUILDER: Uses skin tone, eye and hair color preferences to recommend makeup looks to try on within the app.
After the workshops, we continued to work with Clinique to refine the proposed features.
In addition to the new and improved features, the first app launch was just months before the iPhone 6 release. And with a new branding initiative at Clinique, we also took the opportunity to redesign the app.
