Final Paper

For my final, I am exploring ways to improve the makeup shopping experience for students, before I started my research I started with a hypothesis that buying makeup is expensive for students and getting all the different colors you want from different palettes is not cost-efficient, so I had this idea of allowing people to create their own makeup palette.

With this hypothesis in mind, I wrote my research plan and interviewed 3 Parsons students because they are my target audience, with each of them, I spent about 10 minutes, in order to understand how students shop for makeup currently, what are the problems they face, what can be improved from things already out there. I also had them tested the Balm’s create your own palette page, in order to see how they interacted with the interface and what can be improved since the Balm(https://thebalm.com/pages/design-your-palette) has a similar concept to mine.

After user interview and testing design ideas, I compiled my research findings using Affinity Diagram in order to find out what do people have in common, from which I found that they all love buying makeup online, but they all had somewhat failure experience of getting things that don’t look good on them or don’t suit their skin tone. As students, they may want to keep their budget low when it comes to makeup shopping, and they like to have more recommendations from others so they love to read reviews and hear from bloggers they follow. For the test part, what people have in common are that they all wish that the colors are better categorized, they also wish that there’s a way for them to try on the makeup.

With the students’ goals and concerns in mind, I created my persona in order to have a better focus on whom I am designing for, then I started ideating possible solutions, I think the “make your own palette” business model works for these students, but in order to differentiate from what’s out there and better serve students’ needs, I think people should be able to try on makeup virtually via webcam so that they can see how they look in different colors and looks, I also think the price should be kept low so that it’s more budget friendly for students, also since people are concerned about the quality of makeup I think the ingredients that go into making these color palettes should be eco-friendly.

 

In order to figure out the best layout, I did sketches on paper to play with different layouts, once I am satisfied with the layout on paper I turned my designs into higher fidelity wireframes and I created a prototype in order to test with people.

The user testing was helpful for me to refine the layout and provide more clue to where it may cause confusion for users, for instance, people mentioned that the color name on hover states is very small so maybe it’s better to zoom in the color on hover, people also mentioned that it is not clear how to try on makeup.

Knowing what should be improved based on people’s feedback, I iterated my designs and came to the final designs. I think for future iterations I will try to enhance the virtual try-on experience to make it more realistic, I will also explore other possible ways to improve students’ makeup shopping experience.