Makeup styles can be intimidating and confusing. Many users want to find the optimal makeup styles and techniques for their unique skin tone, facial shapes, and features, but feel overwhelmed by the time and energy this takes. They also want to match their makeup style to specific occasions and their shifting schedules. Our project aims to enhance users’ confidence and overall experience by offering personalized makeup style recommendations and tutorials, while connecting them with a community of skilled makeup enthusiasts.

To understand the problem space better - to understand the varying challenges, significance of this problem to individuals, current methods and their limitations, we first developed a comprehensive interview protocol plan.

Extracting our raw interview notes, we created a descriptive Session Essay on each interview that describes the interview setting, process, users responses, reactions and demonstrations. We then created Activity Notes from each session essay, which we categorized under the following  Affinity Diagram.

Using the Affinity Clustering, we derived 4 significant insights from our interviews:

By keeping in mind the insights, we refined the problem statement and then created a persona to identify with.

The following are the requirements we realized our solution has to meet, based off of our research. Our solution must:

Exploring the existing solution space, we evaluated 20 solutions in this problem space and weighed the features we liked and the limitations they pose. This allowed us to then brainstorm and sketch around 20 design ideas each, thinking out-of-the-box, yet feasible ideas. These idea sketches were gathered and categorized on an "Idea Board" . Using Miro as our collaborative platform, we highlighted ideas that were perceived as innovative, concurrently identifying and linking ideas that had potential synergies, streamlining the process of integrating them into a cohesive solution later on.

Starting off the sketch design of our solution, we created a paper prototype of the idea we envisioned. This Paper Prototype was used to conduct Usability tests to gather feedback and understand how the design and utility of the solution can be improved.

Using the insights from the usability testing feedback with the paper prototype, it informed the creation of our Lo-fi & Mid-fi Figma prototypes. Post a design critique session, we were able to further improve the design, culminating in our Hi-Fidelity Prototype. We performed heuristic evaluations on the prototype based on Nielsen’s 10 heuristics for user interface design, which led to a few more iterations to match the goals and needs of our target users.