• Observational ethnography on site at an actual store
• User interviews conducted in person
• Presented research findings on recommended changes to the Sephora App

For this project, the assignment was to use industry standard research methods to identify opportunities to improve the user experience of the Sephora app, the new AI powered Sephora Beauty Chat, and to bring people into the store.

Findings:

• The majority of beauty consumers use online tools AI, social media, etc. to discover beauty products, but prefer to visit stores to purchase their products.
• In store the Sephora app was typically only used to access loyalty rewards at checkout.
• Sephora’s account making process significantly increases users’ checkout times.
• Users found the account making process tedious and found the UI cluttered.

Recommendations:

• Implement guest checkout.
• Refine AI Beauty chat to be more credible with citations, as well as less sycophantic and immediately agreeable.
• Use the Sephora app to drive in store sales, instead of focusing only on in app sales.
• Declutter the Sephora app UI by reducing the number of items onscreen.
• Host in person events and sales to encourage social interactions and in store foot traffic.

Deliverables

• Detailed research report and summarized slide deck for live presentation.

Observational Ethnography

• My team members and I went to the largest Sephora near us (Cherry Creek Mall in Denver) to observe customer behavior for 1.5 hours.
• Between the three of us, we split the store into three sections: front, middle, and back, and rotated through the sections every 15 minutes.
• I focused on observing shopping behavior, interacting with staff, as well as occasionally interacting with customers and asking the questions if a natural opportunity arose.

In Person User Interviews

• We created a moderator guide with questions about the app, as well as tasks or goals for using the app that we identified as being important, so interviewees could demonstrate their user journey through the app to us in real time.
• Focus was on learning to establish rapport with interviewees, finishing interviews in a timely manner, adapting interview strategies to a variety of different subjects, and getting the most insight out of each user’s unique experiences.

Desk Research

• We started off by conducting desk research about the beauty industry, key competitors in the market, and existing insights about our research questions.