Glow

Skincare Routines Designed With You In Mind

Background

Acne affects everyone differently. Glow helps users learn new information about their body, skincare, and medications to aid them in their journey to understand how their own lifestyles play an effect on their acne. In turn, those suffering can feel more self-confident by taking the step to understand their acne and clear it.


Problem

People who suffer from acne sometimes don’t know or understand their acne’s origins. They try multiple products and/or medications that may or may not work on their specific type of acne, which leads to wasting time and money, as well as fueling the hopelessness of never achieving clear skin.


Solution

Design an application for both men and women, who are stuck on "fixing" their acne and wish to understand more about their body and how that influences their acne.

Role

Sole UI/UX Designer and Researcher. This project is part of the Springboard curriculum I am currently taking.


Duration

June - October 2020
(4 months)


Tools

Adobe XD, Miro

Design & Solution Overview

Users track their journey

After taking pictures, the app's AI analyzes the user's face consisting of the type of acne they have. Users can use the tracker to see their improvement over time. Factors that influenced the skin, such as what foods they ate throughout the day, can also be recorded.

Positive language boosts confidence

Emotionally charged messages like “you look great today!” or “you’re doing a great job!” can provide the user a sense of motivation and make interacting with the app a better experience.

Built-in analysis decreases the time to get the optimal routine

By collecting user information from the onboarding questionnaire, Glow will recommend products that are compatible with the user’s conditions and recommend adjustments to the user’s daily routine.

Intended for those with mild to moderate acne

Glow accomodates users by featuring products that are widely available for mild to moderate acne. However, more severe cases of acne are best solved by the expertise of a dermatologist and prescribed medication. For a safer and more reliable treatment, users who have severe acne and who haven't visited the doctor recently cannot use the app.

Research

Who am I designing for?

In order to understand who I was designing for and their needs, I researched who suffers from acne today and how it affects them. Via online research, I found:

Do people need an app like this?

To learn more about people’s experiences with skincare and acne, I surveyed 22 people who had at least one skin condition.

Here are a couple of questions and results from my survey:

I learned that participants were more comfortable with showing their face to people when their acne was not at its worst or persistent. Most also had another skin condition along with their acne such as eczema or keratosis pilaris.

I also asked them to describe how they felt about their acne and how it had affected their self-confidence. Many found it an annoyance or something they had to cover up. However, for some, it got so bad that one look at their face in the mirror would give them suicidal thoughts.

I wanted to give them a tool that would encourage and allow them to find a solution to do something for their condition so they wouldn’t suffer in silence. I wanted to give them the power to track their journey, find out what they were doing wrong instead of blindly purchasing new and expensive products in hope that it will work for them, and be able to see improvements over time.

I then sought out to personally learn more about people’s experiences with acne. I spoke to five people who answered my survey and who agreed to talk more about their skincare issues with me.

Notable quotes:

“Before I would research products on how to get rid of acne, but they don’t really work. I don't think I've gotten a good product I can rely on even after a few years.” - Cindy C.

“Going out sometimes was a challenge since I had this big [expletive] pimple on my face. Although people aren't focusing on it, I definitely was.” - Karlin O.

“My parents didn’t believe in Western medicine and [my acne] never really got to the point where it was that bad. My brother had way more acne than me, and he never went to the doctor’s. I felt like it was something that would eventually pass.” - Bryant H.

“My main concern for my acne is how to have it all go away and how to get rid of it faster.” - Kahei L.

I found out people had a cycle of discovering, researching, purchasing, testing, and perfecting their routine. However, some never got to the “perfect routine.” They either gave up or they’re still working on it.

For interviewees who had other skin issues, they all agreed that the acne on their face was their highest priority. Everyone had or has a skincare routine for their acne, but rarely focused on their other issues because other people were less critical of those areas.

Ideating

What features benefit my users the most?

From my interviews, I created three user stories to prioritize the needs of potential users.

User stories:

As a person suffering from acne, I want a routine with products that work for me so I can effectively get rid of my acne.

As a person who already has a good skincare routine, I want to find new products to incorporate into my routine to treat my remaining issues.

As a person who has overcome my acne, I want to find a cost-effective repair treatment to get rid of my acne scars.

As a result, I defined three specific features that would have a high impact on the app to create a more fluid user flow and create the Minimal Viable Product (MVP): learning about acne and the causes behind it, establishing a routine, and tracking the user journey.

In addition, I heard three recurring concerns throughout my interviews:

This led me to prioritize the three important components for my app as seen in my Design & Solutions section:

  1. An innovative way for users to track their progress using the product
  2. Positive language in the product to increase their confidence
  3. A built-in analysis to decrease the amount of time to get to the optimal routine

Designing & Testing

Going from sketches to digital wireframes.

With paper wireframes, I guerilla tested 5 participants to see how easily they could navigate through Glow with three given scenarios:

After testing my initial prototype, I went back to the drawing board to reiterate my wireframes.

I initially wanted to make the onboarding process shorter because I understand people don’t enjoy filling out long forms. In this case, however, I discovered the users were okay with filling out the longer form because the analysis would be more accurate and comprehensive in the end.

Users also suggested some questions I could add that could increase accuracy in determining causes and solutions for their acne. “Obvious” or irrelevant questions that didn’t contribute to having healthy skin were eliminated. Questions were also rearranged to follow a more logical order.

Some thought the daily update portion could benefit from having more sections to add in detailed information, such as what medications they were taking or their diet.

It was also difficult for users to manually take pictures of themselves to track their skin improvement. To alleviate this problem, the picture-taking screen was changed to a Face ID inspired photo capture, which the app would automatically take pictures when users rotated their face.

Going from wireframes to high-fidelity prototype.

Using the same scenarios, I did two more rounds of user testing with 10 participants total. For the final iterations, there were two major feedbacks.

The first feedback was that it wasn't apparent to users that after finishing the daily update, the home screen would update to match their input. To solve this problem, I added a confirmation screen to the final prototype.

The second feedback was that the users did not like the clunkiness of clicking or scrolling through different types of analyses on the home page. Therefore, I simplified the analysis section by adding cards and made it all on one page rather than having the user click through tabs.

Visual Design

Glow is meant to be used more often at night when the user is finished with their daily routine. It uses colors found in a sunset to correlate with the end of a day. I used Apple’s default typeface because it had a good readability reputation. With a simple UI, the user could easily focus on what was on screen.

Final Product

After going through the two rounds of user testing for the prototype, this was the final result.

The prototype below is clickable! Feel free to play with it! (Note: Desktop recommended)

Reflections

What did I learn?

User research is the necessary foundation of any design process. I learned that you must constantly think about the user in every step of the way, understanding who you're designing for, and always asking "why" is crucial in bringing your designs to life.

Although it is not perfect, I had to go through many iterations before presenting my final prototype. In addition, not all user-suggested changes are necessary. What I thought would be a straightforward application was not as simple as I envisioned. There were some times where I tested my prototypes and found participants confused and stuck on a user flow. I learned that iterations are vital in designing a product that can be understood by all.

Overall, Glow taught me how to apply conceptual thinking into applied designs. From thinking about the problem to working toward producing a solution, I learned how each step should have a purpose in order to reach the end goal.