Estee Lauder
Our team created an engaging app for beauty consultants to help them create a more inclusive environment in the store. Our design won second place in an Estée Lauder hackathon with over 2,000 participants.
Role: UX Researcher and Designer
Duration: 6 weeks
Contribution: I conversed with several people with disabilities and learned about usability trends. I then prioritized their needs and goals to create a vision for an app which would meet both.
Platform: Mobile
Team size: 6
Customers want more inclusivity and employees want to deliver it.
Our user research found that many customers with disabilities experienced difficulty shopping in store, from narrow store aisles to inaccessible products.
When we talked to store employees, they knew that they wanted to provide better support to people with disabilities. In our design, we intended to bridge this gap between store employees and their customers.
Estee Lauder’s Strength: Making customers feel seen
When we talked to Estee Lauder customers, they said that, as older women, they generally feel invisible in society. But Estee Lauder always makes them feel seen and heard with inclusive marketing and a highly personalized in-store experience.
“How might we help customers with disabilities experience this highly personalized in-store experience?”
This would meet a need among people with disabilities while leveraging a strength of Estee Lauder’s business.
In our research, we found that beauty store employees already enjoyed:
Helping people
Watching 3-minute informational videos
Getting rewards
We set out to create an app where employees could learn how to help people by doing quick tasks and getting rewarded.
We decided to leverage the popularity of gamified learning apps in our design.
We compared popular learning apps like Noom (weight loss psychology), Duolingo (language learning), and Mimo (coding) to start building out some of the components of our design.
Through gamified learning, store employees can learn effortlessly about how to create a more inclusive and welcoming environment for people with disabilities, as well as the best accessible makeup and skincare products for them.
Store employees will feel empowered in their roles, and people with disabilities will feel welcomed and included.
1. Gamified learning to inspire store employees to learn about accessibility
The app features videos, podcasts, daily quizzes, and more - all on the topic of accessibility in the makeup and skincare industry.
2. Rewarding store employees for learning
Store employees shared that their favorite way to learn was 3-minute videos with free rewards at the end.
With this app design, store employees can learn in their favorite learning style, get rewarded for learning, and be equipped to help every person who walks into the store.
3. Teaching about “Accidentally Accessible” products
In-store employees love to help people experiencing different skin textures and more find the products that work best for them.
This app will teach in-store employees which products are “Accidentally Accessible” - accessible for users with disabilities but not originally designed for that purpose.
We discovered tutorials by women with disabilities, for women with disabilities.
We studied competitors’ sites for trends in accessibility. We found clean, straightforward global navigation, representation of women with disabilities, and videos advertising how to use accessible makeup products. These videos featured women with disabilities using the products and instructing their audience how to do so as well. We knew we wanted to include video tutorials in our design, and we did.
See our Plus/Delta Analysis:
“The customer experience is one of the most important things to us at Estee Lauder, so this fits right in with our business model and can be easily incorporated into what we are already doing.”
The IT team at Estee Lauder loved our design because it leveraged a key strength of their business and fit in with their values as a company. They also liked that it incorporated gamified learning, because gamified learning is popular these days.