Exploratory Study for Beauty Shopping App

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Company: Macao Lisa International        Role: Sole Researcher       Timeline: 1 month 

In spring 2021, Lisa International was in the early stage of developing a beauty shopping App.  

The research that I conducted for this project had two goals:  

1, Exploration: gain an in-depth understanding of what macau customers like or dislike about existing beauty Apps. 

2, Delivering requirements: if Lisa International company were to create a beauty shopping App, what elements / features can provide the best user experience? 

  -   In-context interview

  -   Surveys

  -   Personas 

  -   Competitive Audit 

  -   Customer pain points: (Top 4) 

• Quality of products: customers expressed concern about the quality of purchased online products. They claimed that the product description on the App did not match the products they received. 
• Fake reviews: customers surveyed were concerned about the fake reviews on the App. 
• Confidentiality of personal info: customers believe that their personal information is susceptible to leakage. 
• Inaccurate description of products: customers complained about useless & inaccurate description of the products on the App, which can be time-consuming to read and negatively influence their purchasing decision. 

  -   Desired features: ( Top 4) 

• Accurate & detailed product description: customers wish to read accurate descriptions, videos, and unedited photos while shopping online to understand products better.
• Customer reviews: customers want to read other consumers’ reviews about the products while shopping via App, which can help them understand the positive and negative aspects of the products they wish to purchase.
• Customer service: customers desire easy access to customer service while using the App. Notably, customers found robot chat is useless and wished to chat with a real person who could help them address the problems. 
• Sensitive search function: customers wish to have a search function that can help them easily find the products they want instead of providing them irrelevant products after the search. 

  - Strategic impact: 

• Product strategies were supported by research.

  - Stakeholder collaboration impacts: 

• Through stakeholder collaboration, the product team formulated new and effective strategies. 
• UX research has become an essential part of the product development process where cross-functional partners constantly rely on for insights. 
• Product teams were more empathetic towards users: Through research findings, designers, engineers, and programmers understand whom they are building the products for, what frustrates users the most, and how they can play a role in addressing these problems.

   - Product impacts: 

•  Impact design directions: Informed by research findings, designers incorporated these insights into the prototype.   

  - Use multiple research methods so that the limitation of one method can be mitigated by data from other sources. Triangulation increase the credibility of the research. 

  -  Involve stakeholders in the research process to solidify buy-in through a shared understanding of the fact deriving from research. 

  -  Conduct stakeholder interviews early in the process to understand the business objectives, stakeholder's expectations of the research, and the backstage information (what have been done in the past; what has worked /not worked; etc.,)