ROLE
Sole UX Designer & Researcher
User Research, UX/UI Design, Prototyping
STRATEGIES
TOOLS
Figma, Adobe Illustrator
TIMELINE
Jan - Feb 2023
Overview 🗯
As a woman, I’m affected by the high costs of products marketed towards women whenever I shop personal care. Many of my friends prefer men’s products (razors, deodorant, etc). Why? They’re often cheaper and higher quality. This inspired me to create an app, Iris, that can help everyone who shops for feminine items and make the process less frustrating and more rewarding. I worked on this project independently and am responsible for its end-to-end creation.
Iris is a shopping app to find the best deals, comparisons, and reviews for feminine care products.
Problem ❗
Products marketed towards women cost an average of 7% more than those marketed towards men. Certain product categories can reach even higher; feminine razors cost almost 25% more than men’s. Women are still making less for every dollar a man makes, and those who buy feminine products pay more for products that often are not better in quality.
The Pink Tax, which is the tendency for feminine products to be more expensive than men’s, makes shopping personal care a struggle.
Challenge
How might we make feminine care shoppers feel more confident in their browsing processes and comfortable in their decisions?
Research 🔎
Goals
I began with some secondary research into the feminine personal care industry to gain a better understanding of the market trends and demographics. Through my research, I wanted to:
Understand the market trends of the feminine personal care and hygiene industries
Identify Iris’s target market
Identify Iris’s competitors and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses
Understand the experiences people have when personal care shopping
Discover the goals, needs, motivations, and frustrations of potential Iris users
Market research
Through market research, I was able to gain a more thorough understanding of the cost disparities between personal care products, market trends, and targeted demographics in the feminine care industry.
Consumer trends
Personal care products targeted for women cost an average of 13% more. The name “Pink Tax” has been given to this phenomenon
The pandemic added $219 billion to the US ecommerce sales from 2020-2021
The feminine hygiene market is projected to grow from USD 38.18 billion in 2021 to USD 54.52 billion in 2028
United States generates over 10 billion U.S. dollars per year from the hair care market
Demographics
The majority of women targeted by the feminine hygiene brands are ages 15-25 years
Millennial women (ages 18 to 34) are the heaviest buyers of beauty products
Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases
Competitive Analysis 📊
After learning more about the domain of personal care, I wanted to take a closer look at popular shopping apps and how they’re helping their users shop for personal care items. Through my market research, I identified some top direct and indirect competitors within the industry: Amazon, Target, and Walmart, and what they had or didn't have to offer.
Discoveries
Despite the popularity of the competitors that I investigated, I aimed to identify their limitations and determine how to create solutions that compensate for their shortcomings. I discovered that not all shopping platforms include a full ingredient list for products. I also discovered that it can be difficult to search for cruelty-free and vegan products, as they’re usually not standalone categories.
User Research Interviews ✨
Process
After understanding more about feminine personal care and potential issues, I started forming questions I could ask potential interviewees. I initially sent a document of 10 questions to 17 people, mostly identifying as female, in the target age range for Iris: 18-35. I asked questions pertaining to their shopping habits of feminine personal care items, their goals, frustrations, desires, and more. Then, I decided to conduct interviews with five of them to gain a deeper understanding of their views and behavior.
Discoveries
100% of participants interviewed were upset with the price of feminine products
100% of participants preferred if they could see products price-matched
94% of participants looked at reviews when buying a new product
88% of participants stated that they often buy haircare and skincare products online
When asking participants, “What frustrates you the most when shopping personal care?”, one stated,
Affinity Mapping 🌟
After I finished writing notes and documenting data from my five interviews, I decided to create affinity maps on my wall.
Discoveries
Seeing my interviewees’ frustrations drawn out in front of made my motivation for this project skyrocket. Their reaction to my idea was very positive; many STRUGGLE to find affordable high quality products. I found a few different patterns: those who prioritized brand over cost stuck with brands because they were too nervous to try new products. Those who prioritized cost over brand almost always read reviews before purchasing. All participants were frustrated with personal care costs.
Filtering options, like vegan/cruelty free
Visually pleasing design
Multitude of categories: haircare, skincare, bathing, makeup, hygiene
Searching by brand, name, or price
😊 People Like:
Spending too much time searching for their desired product
The cost of certain products, like pads/razors
Not being able to see full ingredient lists
Not being able to see highly-rated reviews easily
😣People Dislike:
Persona 👩
Based on the research insights, I developed a primary persona demonstrating Iris’s target users, especially their goals and pain points. I hypothesized that Iris would have one user-type and one primary persona: someone who is essentially frustrated with the costs of personal care items. I created Emily, the embodiment of my synthesized data from market and user-research.
Designing 🪄
Task flow
After researching and synthesizing my data into a persona, I started thinking about possible features and screens for Iris. Before creating prototypes, I wanted to have a good understanding of how common shopping app processes work. I created a simple task flow for a user trying to buy shampoo.
Information Architecture
In addition to my task flow, I created a basic map of features I want Iris to include based on findings from my market and user-research. The majority of my interviewees wanted to be able to purchase from an assortment of categories, not just feminine hygiene. They wanted to be able to purchase haircare, skincare, and more on the same app as well. So, I mapped out four navigation areas: Home, Search, Cart, Profile, and other subcategories.
Medium fidelity wireframes
After writing some ideas out on paper, I switched to creating some medium-fidelity prototypes of each navigation menu on Figma.
Low fidelity wireframes
I started to draw out lo-fi prototypes of my app, including screens such as home, item, cart, payment, and more. My interviewees wanted an app that was intuitive, so I made sure to include features that are common in other shopping apps in order to mitigate their intrinsic cognitive load.
Final Prototype 🖥
Iris is a product built for women and those who identify with other gender identities who all struggle with the cost of feminine personal care items. Iris wants to make shopping easy, transparent, and fun!
Search — Categories
Haircare — Subcategories
Shampoo List
Product Screen
Key features
Know what’s in a product.
On a product’s “Details” tab, specifications are listed, including whether or not the product is vegan/cruelty free. There is also a full ingredient list provided — no more searching for hidden chemicals!
Find cheaper options.
On a product’s “Compare” tab, similar products are shown — at a better price! Match percentage and common shared features are also listed.
See what others think.
On a product’s “Reviews” tab, the average rating is showcased at the top with the most popular reviews right below. Finding out how others view a product has never been simpler!
Find vegan/cruelty-free products with ease.
In the search section, there is a “Filters” drop-down menu. Users can search for specifically vegan or cruelty-free products without having to trudge through long description!
Style Guide 🖍
For consistency and simplicity, I created a style guide to keep track of colors and icons used inside of Iris.
Reflecting… 🌱
Things I would have done differently
I would have conducted more interviews with people of different gender identities and ages to be more inclusive overall.
I also would have spent longer talking with interviewees and go deeper with my questions (as they were my first ever interviews, my questions were lacking!).
Learnings
A continuous focus on potential users is crucial; often, it was difficult to relate all of my design choices to user frustrations and wants.
Understand tradeoffs in decision-making: being able to explain why I did certain things over others was difficult, but important to be able to clearly communicate my design process and reasonings.