IPSY App Redesign
Roles
Information architecture
UX research and design
Timeline
2 weeks
Introduction
For this project, I chose to redesign the IPSY app, a popular beauty subscription service known for delivering personalized products to your door each month.
IPSY users love the thrill of personalized beauty products and the excitement of the monthly “mystery box” delivery.
However, user reviews and feedback reveal some frustrations with the app experience.
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Highlighted Issues from User Reviews:
- No search function for finding products
- Difficult to navigate with no back or exit buttons
- Unsubscribe option is hard to locate
- Poor app planning leading to confusion and frustration
- No clear contact section, FAQ, or chat support
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Key problem:​
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The app's current design creates a confusing and inefficient experience for users, making it hard to find key features and switch between tasks. This leads to high cognitive load and frustration. To enhance usability and simplify navigation, the app needs a redesign that reduces complexity and ensures users can effortlessly access all essential features and manage their subscription with ease.​
To dive deeper into the problems with the app’s usability, I conducted user interviews and app walkthroughs with three testers. Here's what they had to say:
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- It often takes multiple trial-and-error attempts to find what they’re looking for
- The experience is time-consuming, frustrating, and demotivating
- The app needs more footer items and better organization to be more user-friendly
- The app makes them feel uncared for and disregarded
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On average, when asked to rate the difficulty of completing tasks, users gave it a 7 out of 10
A Current example of the disorganization of the app is the offers section. To reach it from the shop page is a 4-step process.
The way it's currently placed, it's not a page the user looks to find, since there's no hint of its existence in most areas.
In order to make the app easier to navigate, I started out by creating a content inventory of everything the app offers, and organized the information into app flows. I then filtered out any redundant features or unecessary ones ( that did not fulfil a purpose, but added extra cognitive load for the user).
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Now in order to understand how this content should be organized, I conducted card sorting exercises, asking users to arrange the content into categories that they felt the information belonged in.
Here's what I learned:
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- People felt strongly that there should be a section to represent everything that relates directly back to the user. This included payment infomation, beauty preferences quiz, subscription and more.
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- The users also felt like the blogs required their own section since the mindset required to engage with that kind of content is different than shopping.
- The membership page was not one that they felt strongly about. That information was linked with themselves directly, so it fell under that category
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- The 'more' menu item was not something users felt inclined to explore unless they had to. So the information there was not being processed as a part of the app, more like a secondary option if all else failed​
Based on user feedback, I chose to redesign the bottom navigation and header. To allow users to navigate the app more freely, multitasking is key, and this is best achieved with a thoughtfully designed bottom navigation.
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1. The heart icon ( liked products) and the cart icon were very closely linked in the eyes of the users, so I decided to place them together, so they are easy to switch between.
2. I pulled apart the 'more' section and distributed it into other categories. This way, a clear mental model of the app is created in the user's mind, of what exactly the app has to offer.
3. A homepage was created for advertisement so that it wasn't constantly interrupting the user's exprience when they're trying to do something else.
4. The offers section I felt was quite important to showcase because it is a very exciting and motivating section to encourage users to shop on the ipsy app. It reinstates IPSY's benefit for the user, which in return is beneficial to IPSY. WINWIN.
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For each page I reorganized, I identified the problems it was causing and designed solutions to address them. My purpose was to redesign the navigational aspect of the app, it was not an entire app redesign.
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Taking the shop page for instance, there were many problems with the design
- Unnecessary IPSY header taking up space
This is the redesigned shop page
- Ipsy header was replaced with a new one
- Search bar was added
- Cart icon is now given it's own 2D space
- Filters were given a clear section
- Footer highlights which page we're on
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So all the problems were replaced with a solution. And when asked about the difficulty level of the screen now, users rated it a
0.5 out of 10. A huge improvement!
If you'd like to see the working prototype, please click here. ​​
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Key learnings: ​
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I gained a lot of valuable perspective on user research, which played a key role in shaping my design.
Initially, I believed user research needed to be very broad to gather useful quantitative data. However, through this project, I learned that diving deeper into the user experience with a small, well-interviewed group can be just as, if not more, effective in uncovering meaningful insights.
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I started this project with a clear design in mind. I had a strong vision for what the header and bottom navigation should include, and I shaped that early on. However, after conducting card sorting exercises and user interviews, I was surprised by how users connected pieces of data in ways I hadn’t anticipated—especially when they weren’t seeing the full picture of the app. This experience taught me that stepping back from the bigger picture and focusing on perfecting one part of the design process (in this case, information architecture) can help lay the foundation for a stronger overall design.