UX Research and Visual Design

FELOH: The Social Experience

Giving FELOH's current mobile application a UX overhaul encompassing UX writing, UX best practices, and UI elements.

Job Description

UX Design

UI Design

Project Manager

Timeline

 3 weeks

Tools

 Adobe XD

 Google forms

PROTOTYPE LINK
Click here to view the prototype for FELOH

Overview

Realizing FELOH's [For everyone's love of hair + beauty] needed a UX/UI overhaul, FELOH approached my team to redesigned the social function of its IOS mobile application. We focused our efforts on streamlining the onboarding and posting processes, better defining the curl coin rewards system, and enhancing UX writing.

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My Role 

For this project I was one of four members of the UX design team conducting research, creating functional prototypes, and usability testing.

Further, I was the Project Manager for this small team, which included documentation of all images, creation of user surveys, brainstorming sessions, user data, organizing timelines, team meeting facilitation, and deliverables transfer. 

Meet our Client FELOH! 

For Everyone's Love of Hair + Beauty

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FELOH [For Everyone’s Love of Hair and Beauty] is the premier hair and beauty app combining the world of e-commerce with the world of social media. It is Amazon meets Instagram with a hair and beauty filter on, and it’s so much more.
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FELOH is a social marketplace experience. It’s a place where beauty content is shared, celebrated, rewarded, and purchased. Users can identify with and follow 'squads' to define their community. They get monetary rewards called Curl Coins for social interactions like posting images and connecting with their community. Then they can then spend their Curl Coins in the marketplace, which features socially conscious independent brands.

At FELOH, the hair and beauty marketplace is also your hair and beauty social space. It’s a place where you can discover, share, and purchase all things hair and beauty.


Current State of the FELOH Mobile Application

FELOH approached us with an initial request. To redesign their mobile application, which needed a UX facelift to appeal to their target audience of younger Millennials and Gen-Zers. While they love their current audience of older Millennials, they felt that the future of FELOH included people of all ages. They also wanted users to be able to shop for products inside the social feed.

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FELOH's current IOS application.

Research Methods

Hover to learn more
Learned that users want
to expand FELOH's
offerings to include hair,
beauty, and skincare.
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Users are more attracted
to a minimalistic platform.
This audience often shops
and buys on social media
platforms.
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Observed current users
when using the app to
discover posting habits,
and app navigation.
Compiled data into
a user personas to
represent how a
beauty enthusiast
might interact with
the application.

We learned about a few pain points of the present application:

Current Pain Points

Current pain points include: the onboarding process, logo design, the posting process, and the rewards program

Personas

Using all of the information we gathered from the interviews and the Affinity Map, we created the Proto-Personafor FELOH's enthusiast user to represent how an enthusiast might interact with the application based on their goals.

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A proto-persona showing Tonya, a beauty enthusiast who wants to connect with people that share the same beauty goals.

Our research brought us to a conclusion:
 
Users generally liked the idea of a mobile application that exists as both a social space and a marketplace. But FELOH needed a UX and visual design overhaul.

The Goal of this MVP

The problem: Feloh users need a personalized platform where they can discover content and make meaningful connections. The solution: We will streamline the existing FELOH application bringing it up to accessibility standards and social media conventions so users can flow and thrive through the social experience.

Our Features

Our team focused on enhancing 5 key components of the mobile application based on the needs of users. For the purpose of the case study I am going to take a deep dive into the onboarding, curl coin rewards, and social shopping.

The features we plan to address are: expanding the app to encompass hair, beauty, and skincare, update the onboarding flow, create a posting process that allows users to add a caption, tag, and edit their posts. We plan to enhance the curl coin rewards system, and create a way for users to shop directly in their social feed.

Rethinking the FELOH Application

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We began circling in on some of the issues we wanted to focus on improving. It became apparent that if the app was going to get many new users, we needed to improve the onboarding flow. If we wanted our users to fill the app with excellent content, we’d need to refine the posting process and better define the curl coin rewards system. Also, the current app focuses only on hair, but to expand the audience, we would need to include all things beauty and skincare. Finally, it’s all well and good for FELOH to be the pioneer social media marketplace combo, but that means we needed to put some thought into merging the world of likes, shares with the world of add to cart, and checkout.

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Logo Redesign

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We initially weren't going to touch the logo in this first sprint. Still, it became clear that it had some accessibility and readability issues, so we decided to see what we could do to improve it. The most pressing issues we uncovered were with the background's color accessibility, so we removed the background and stretched the letters making them easier to read.

We wanted a logo that would read well at various sizes, and that kept FELOH's fun, free-spirited energy. We still incorporated the gradient and cloud shapes from the original logo throughout the app because it felt so important to the brand, so keep an eye out in the prototype.

A view of the old FELOH logo and our redesigned logo.

Reimagining the Onboarding Flow

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The onboarding needed to accomplish the user goals of signing up while also accomplishing FELOH's goals with a few questions that would directly affect their user profile. The onboarding had to also introduce users

to the curl coin reward system and that they are a Very Important FELOH [V.I.F.] By recreating the onboarding flow we are able to better engage the user by implementing meaningful questions making the user feel the app is personalized to them.


A/B Testing the Onboarding Flows

We felt like the onboarding process was fertile ground for experimentation because of its huge potential to impact a user’s first impression, overall experience, and desire to return to the app. We built out three options and ran an A/B test to shed some light on the subject.

We tested whether users preferred the long flow, a medium length flow, and then finally a short barebones flow asking only for a username and password, with the intent of the user filling in profile information later on.

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An image detailing the long, short, and medium onboarding flows that we A/B tested with users.


Through testing we discovered that users preferred the medium length onboarding. 

This medium flow asked users to establish login information along with what type of FELOH user they are, and what their interests are in the FELOH community. These questions seemed to be just enough to keep the users engaged and confident in the experience. While accomplishing FELOH's goals of having the user begin to fill out their profile.  Below is the completed onboarding flow.


The medium length onboarding flow that users prefered.


Usability Testing the Social Shopping Experience

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The client wanted to create a way for the users to easily purchase a product directly from the social feed. After conducting research and determining users enjoy that feature in other applications we began to implement that feature into FELOH's social space. We conducted three rounds of usability tests before users were 100% successful in shopping from their social feed.


Iteration 1

Iteration 2

Iteration 3


The Final FELOH

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For our final prototype, we finalized the onboarding flow, simplified the posting process, built out the curl coin features and animations, and enhanced the shopping function within the application's social side.

Check out the Prototype
in its current state
Video walking through the onboarding process

Onboarding

After extensive user research, we determined that the user prefers a medium length onboarding process with the option to edit their profile once inside the application. We included two
questions that would directly affect the user's name-tag.
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We also focused on getting the user acquainted with the
Curl Coin Rewards System and the Very Important FELOH [V.I.F] while still in the onboarding flow.

Video walking through the posting process

Posting a Photo

Any good social media app has to have a smooth posting process. We focused on creating a simple process where users can edit and tag people, products, squads, and locations.
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Sharing a photo, as well as each tag, will reward the user with 5 Curl Coins.

We also included a way for users to go back and edit their photos once it was posted, a feature that FELOH is currently lacking.

Video walking through the curl coin rewards system and the new FELOH wallet

Curl Coin Rewards

To update the Curl Coin Rewards System, we created a FELOH wallet that users can access from the Curl Coin button on every page's top right. We included the number of curl coins
the user has visible on the page so they can check their balance whenever they want.

We added animations to emphasize when users got rewarded with Curl Coins.

Inside the FELOH wallet, users can learn much more about the rewards program.

Video walking through shopping items in the social feed

Shopping in a Social Space

FELOH is unique in that it allows users to shop from both the marketplace and the social space. Tagging a product in a post will add an 'Add to Cart' button on that post.

Once a user clicks the 'Add to Cart' button, that item will appear inside the cart. Every item shopped inside the FELOH
application will go to this cart. Creating a seamless transition from casual scrolling to productive purchase.

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Next Steps

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While we have completed the first design sprint, we have many more ideas for later sprints.

We want to implement a few gamification tactics to increase engagement with users and encourage them to further fill out their user profiles after the initial onboarding flow.

FELOH is an app for beauty enthusiasts, professionals, and brands alike. We focused on the enthusiast for this sprint, but for a later sprint, we would do user research to build out the app to be used by professionals and brands.

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Lessons Learned

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Creating a user friendly app for a client, a designer needs to juggle what the client wants and what the user wants. The most challenging aspect of this project was making sure the rewards program made sense to the user. Because of the terminology [V.I.F, Curl Coin] and the unconventionality of this rewards program, it was essential for us to make sure it was digestible to the user.

I'd love you to check out more
of my work!

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