DESIGN
YSL BEAUTE
A digital transformation design project for YSL Beaute, a brand of L'Oreal, aims to help L'Oreal make better use of a new digital touchpoint - Wechat Mini Program to better penetrate the Chinese e-commerce market.
Client
L'OREAL CHINA
Year
APR - JUN, 2020
My Role
Solo Product Designer
Team
Growing IO (Data Engineering)
3 Marketing
Tools
Figma
Adobe Creative Suite
Overview
In early 2020, L'Oréal China made an internal user experience satisfaction report on its brands' e-commerce platforms. The YSL beaute's WeChat Mini Program ranked last in user experience satisfaction, but its platform sales were among the best. L'Oreal didn't want to let a bad experience affect sales in the long run, so there was such a project.
Design Challenge
With more than 300 million daily active users of Mini Programs on WeChat ecosystem, this new digital touchpoint has become a prominance of Chinese app market. L'Oréal as a foreign company, how might we help them redesign an e-commerce mini program that elevates the online shopping experience to gain access to this huge user group on WeChat and expand YSL beaute's market share in China?
Business Goals
Create sustainable sales growth for the Mini Program platform through increasing user stickiness.
Design Demo
CONTEXTS
What is WeChat Mini Program (MP)?
Mini-programs (MPs) are built-in apps within WeChat, the instant messaging turned super app that is woven into all aspects of Chinese people’s lives. It allows users to have access to millions of apps, from games to e-commerce platforms, to government service providers, without downloading anything.
RESEARCH
Convert Business Goals to Design Problems.
To understand the design problems through business expectation from Loreal, I need to ask:
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Who are the users? What's their expectation of the experience?
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What's the biggest challenge of our target audience?
Easy Access to WeChat's Private Traffic Pools
WeChat is China's powerhouse app. As sub-apps operated on WeChat Ecosystem, retailers can easily gain access to WeChat existing users without doing intensive user acquisition.
Ecosystem-wise Traffic Attracting
Companies can take advantage of its own WeChat official accounts, WeChat group sales operations, and WeChat Moment ads to reach customers and increase online conversion rates.
Lower Development Costs than Regular Apps
WeChat Mini Programs function like normal mobile phone apps, but require less time and financial resources to develop them compared to normal apps.
Why do brands take MPs so seriously now?
STEP 01
Understand the Audience.
To make sure the reliability of the decision-making, Loreal hired a data engineering company Growing IO to work with us. With the help of Growing IO, we got the demographic and consumption data of our members on the YSL Beaute WeChat Mini Program. The result is surprising.
The proportion of Male Members
68%
The average consumption of male users is 1.8 times that of female users
1.8
The proportion of orders with gift set products
63.8%
Member
Structure
User Interview
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As a female beauty brand, why are there more male active users on the platform?
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Why are the sales of gift set products so high?
The team and I felt so perplexed about the data and came up with two questions. We have reached out to 10 male & 5 female members on the platform, trying to understand their purchase behavior and to see if they could answer our questions.
User Interview
The Main User Groups:
After a brief first-round user interview, we synthesized the information gathered into main User Personas.
Learnings:
The User Personas answered the questions I ask.
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Different from other e-commerce platforms, the users on YSL mini program purchase products as gifts, it explains why gift set products account for the majority of sales.
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As a female beauty brand, expert users are mainly females, but they tend to choose lower-priced third-party channels to buy products for their own use. That's the reason why YSL mini-program has more male members.
GIFTING
as main consumer motivation
HOW MIGHT WE
Redesign the YSL Mini Program to provide a successful gifting experience?
User Group 01
Amateur Customers
01
Amateur customers have limited access and awareness of the YSL mini program.
Let's take a look at some event tracking data (by GrowingIO) to connect the dots:
The infographic below shows current user's the most high-frequency entrances to launch YSL mini program on WeChat.
WeChat Moment is an "Instagram-like" feature on WeChat, where people post pictures and videos to socialize with WeChat friends. WeChat Moment Ads are powered by a smart recommendation engine that helps businesses accurately advertise to target personas. Amateur customers rarely search or discuss beauty products on WeChat, which makes them hard to find YSL ads on WeChat Moment and launch the YSL mini Program, because AI categorizes them as non-target users.
02
Amateur customers have a hard time picking the right product that recipients like.
Picking the right gift the recipient likes is the key to a successful gifting experience.
However, the limited knowledge about beauty products makes the gift shopping process more challenging.
"I‘m not sure if she'd love my gift. There are just so many colors for just one kind of lipstick! "
"If my girlfriend doesn't like this, I'll be so screwed."
"I feel extremely hard when I pick those products because beauty products are very personal."
STEP 02
Identify the User Challenges.
To unearth more specific insights, I mapped out two User Journeys for both user groups and identified several obstacles and challenges that prevent users from having a successful gifting experience.
User Group 02
Expert Customers
01
Some of the expert customers are still not aware of the fact that official channel's higher price can bring a better gifting experience.
The official channel provides wonderful gift-giving services such as gift box packaging and customized services, but the YSL mini program failed to highlight its value, which resulted in the loss of some target users.
“I'm used to buying at Sephora because it's cheaper.”
“I didn't know the engraving services on mini program."
IDEATION
As the solo designer of the product, I organize a co-design workshop to share my research insights, have more people brainstorm the features of the product, and vote on the priorities.
Who I invited: 4 Marketing, 1 Data Engineer, 2 Users
Agenda:
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Share my research and bring everyone on board.
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Brainstorm solutions to pain points unearthed.
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Prioritize features and define the long-term vision (Design Principles).
WORKSHOP SYNTHESIS
Translate problems into specific features.
In the workshop, we co-created over 100 features and prioritized them under the Product Requirement Prioritization spreadsheet down below.
Product Requirement Prioritization
01
Supportive + Socialized
Make full use of the social attributes of the WeChat platform, engaging expert users and customer service staff to influence and support ameture users.
Design Principles:
I systhesized the these features under 3 design principles. which will be served as the long-term vision of the product.
02
Insightful + Actionable
Inspire users when they shop gifts on YSL mini program, and provide clear user flow to increase conversion and checkout rate.
03
Exclusive + Premium
Highlight exclusive services and offerings on the official channel along with the shopping user flow to acquire more expert users. We want our customers to feel valued when they choose us.
SUPPORTIVE + SOCIALIZED
AR Virtual Try-on - bridge the gap in the community.
"The act of shopping is increasingly becoming a social activity." At L'oreal, we want to highlight this nature of shopping, especially when it comes to gift shopping. One of the best thing about WeChat platform is that businesses can utilized its social nature to increase sales and customer loyalty.
We decided to grasp this nature and utilize AR technology to bridge this community, with AR virtual try-on feature, we can:
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Support ameture users to find a right gift through uploading gift receiver's picture.
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Engage expert users to try out different products and share their try-on pictures on WeChat for advice, increasing the exposure of YSL mini program to more people, especially to ameture users (on WeChat Moment, group/private chat).
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Ameture users can share try-on pictures to professional customer service staff to gain more confidence for the gift.
FINAL DELIVERABLES
Design Principles + Final Design.
With the help of L'Oreal Marketing Team, we co-created 3 design principles that served as the core values of our design. These principles are: Supportive + Socialized, Insightful + Actionable, and Exclusive + Premium.
SUPPORTIVE + SOCIALIZED
YSL Fans Group Chat - a supportive community.
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Users always have access to the customer service staff throughout the whole shopping flow, simply click the floating button.
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Users can even scan the QR code to add a YSL beauty specialist on WeChat, users can ask their own specialist any questions you have.
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The beauty specialist will invite users to a YSL Fans Group Chat, where users can find more exclusive services provided by YSL.
SUPPORTIVE + SOCIALIZED
Intimate Pay - pay for your loved ones.
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Sometimes, giving a right gift is a very complicated choice. But now, with the "Intimate Pay" feature, you can ask the receiver to pick the gift and you can still pay for them with a simple click.
INSIGHTFUL + ACTIONABLE
KOL Live Commerce - inspire, watch and shop.
Live commerce combines instant purchasing of a featured product and audience participation through a chat function or reaction buttons. In China, live commerce has transformed the retail industry and established itself as a major sales channel in less than five years. In a 2020 survey, two-thirds of Chinese consumers said they had bought products via livestream in the past year (Mckinsey, 2020).
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Inspire customers to purchase.
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Simple add to cart and check out process.
INSIGHTFUL + ACTIONABLE
Smart Recommendation Search Engine
According to our survey, 68.87% of participants' knowledge of beauty products was from KOL's Livestream broadcast. So we refined the search engine in the following ways:
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The search bar will recommend the most popular products that most KOLs promote in their broadcast. If a user just watched a live broadcast, the search bar will recommend products shared in the KOL's live.
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Nickname searching: Chinese customers named all of YSL's popular products by nicknames, so the new search engine also supports nickname searching (eg. Little Gold Stick, Night Queen).
EXCLUSIVE + PREMIUM
Brand New Cart Design
The shopping cart is the last step before checkout, so that consumers can intuitively feel that the value for money is an important step to form conversions and increase sales.
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More Intuitive Visualization of Exclusive Services: The newly designed shopping cart categorizes purchases and giveaways as well as official exclusive benefits. At the information level, consumers can intuitively feel the extra gifts and exquisite services that they can enjoy when shopping through official channels.
Because our consumers usually buy gifts on our platform. Gift wrapping and other exclusive services (such as personalized engraving) are important factors in the premium feel and gift-giving experience. Therefore, we have added UI design emphasizing our exclusive gift-giving service on the homepage, product details page and personal homepage, so that consumers can more intuitively feel the more premium and exclusive quality of the official platform.
EXCLUSIVE + PREMIUM
Highlight YSL Brand Value in Design.
Quick glance at the new Mini Program stats:
(Nov 2020 vs Jan 2021)
12k
New Users Increase
63%
Cart Checkout Rate Increase
4.6/5
New Customer Satisfaction Score
Reflection
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User Experience vs. Client Experience: As a product designer, in addition to solving user problems, learn how to tell stories from the client's perspective. At L'Oréal, there are people from various departments taking care of this project, including developers and marketers. How to get them to better understand the design is the key to the successful delivery of the project. So I made a product requirement priority form, a user experience report and a new feature summary poster, in order to effectively communicate the design plan to L'Oreal's different functions, and give a detailed action plan.
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Use data to tell the story: As a designer who values a lot about data and numbers, it's very interesting to work with GrowingIO to track the traffic of our design. I love seeing how my design directly influences users' interaction with the app and how I can improve it by understanding the numbers and watching the website's session recordings.
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Tradeoffs: Most of the time, I don't have enough time to do sufficient research as I thought, so it's important to do tradeoffs during the design process, we will never be able to design a perfect product, so it's important to design with intentions: how I want users to navigate through the site and how can I use visual hierarchies and interactions to reinforce my intention.
