Client
SalonCentric (L’Oreal)
Role
Lead Product Designer
Timeline
~6 months (Shipped late 2021)
Background
SalonCentric, a subsidiary of L’Oreal is one of the largest wholesale salon and beauty supply distributors, serving more than one million licensed beauty professionals in the US. Their goal is to become leaders in the professional beauty space, supporting the growth, education and success of all beauty professionals.
Ensuring continued education and certification doesn't stop because of the pandemic
Over the 2020 pandemic, stylists were hit hard with social distancing limitations, unable to practice their craft and continue their education. In-person classes were cancelled and there were little online resources to help them navigate the uncertainty of the pandemic.
The Ask
SalonCentric approached us to help them reimagine stylist education on their website and app in order to continue supporting the growth, education, and success of beauty professionals.
Approach
My team interviewed several stakeholders from the Education team, Digital team, Marketing team, and Suite Stylist team to understand the SalonCentric perspective, needs, and requirements. We also leveraged customer research from our App design work to understand our audience and their goals.
We combined our interview insights with site traffic data to find potential areas of opportunity and improvement. I joined the team right after the research was done and helped define the vision and strategy and executed the designs.
Two main opportunity themes emerged from this research:
Create a full integrated way for stylists to engage in various educational opportunities
Build a community for stylists interact and learn from professionals and their peers
Education must be personalized to our customer.
Concepts
We conducted a working session with the SalonCentric team to ideate concept ideas based on opportunity areas and our core vision and strategy. Within the week, we came up with nine concepts that focused on how SalonCentric can be the education partner to help stylists grow, which in turn helps SalonCentric grow:
• Guide the stylist through curated topics that fit their needs and schedules
• Build a connected shop <> learn <> grow experience at every touchpoint
• Create a community for stylists and salon owners to interact and learn from each other
Early Designs
In the first half of the design phase, the on-demand (Learning Tracks) learning program was centered around high-quality and interactive content featuring a gamification system to monitor progress, competitive quizzes, loyalty rewards, and an edu-commerce component.
Challenges
Halfway through developing the concepts, the content and development budgets were cut.
We now needed to figure out how to implement features to scale and provide value to our customers without over-hauling the current infrastructure.
HMW integrate existing content into Learning Tracks?
Although SalonCentric didn’t have adequate resources at the time to roll out new programming, their permanent content library housed a ton of high quality content, which we transformed into curated collections of topics for our Learning Tracks—while still leaving space for us incorporate certifications, loyalty, and community engagement for future iterations.
HMW make the Education Hub more engaging?
The old Education Hub was under-utilized and many of SalonCentric’s content that they’ve invested heavily was getting lost in the older infrastructure. We needed to make the existing content more discoverable, more engaging, and more relevant.
Status Quo
The "before" Learn experience. The information architecture didn't match the students' mental model for searching and browsing content. While there is plenty of content, it is not highly discoverable nor particularly inspiring from the landing page.
We looked to card sorting to help us get an idea of what our customers wanted to see once they land on the Education Hub. We combined those results with personalization to design a dynamic land experience with swappable components for live classes, bite-sized learning modules, store events, learning tracks, tools, artist highlights, and Pro Beauty Central content.
Experience Outcome