Objective: The goal of this project was to uncover an untapped space in the market through research, concept creation, business development and user testing.
Process: User Research, Interviews, Synthesis, Insights, Strategy, Ideation, Prototype, User Testing, Final Prototype, Business Model, Value Proposition, Branding, Marketing Campaign, Storyboarding, Writing, Final Video and Presentation.
Solution: Au Kurate - A Service Platform for women in beauty, fashion and wellness that aligns experts with the end consumers through one to one guidance.
Learnings: In highly cluttered online market spaces like fashion and beauty, customers seek personalized and customized human experiences, much like the one available in-store. Hybrid experiences are the key to future retail growth.
Time: 10 weeks
Role: Design Manager, Service Design, Visual & Communication Design
As a team, we kicked off our research by familiarizing ourselves with the current beauty and fashion industry. We selected to use IDEO’s Human Centered Design (HCD) thinking process and the double diamond methodology to guide our scope of research. These tools helped shape our research umbrella question in addition to the sub-questions.
In Human Centered Design (HCD), empathy is a critical tool for understanding and designing for the user rather than our own needs or assumptions. This map embodies 6 notions of empathy senses: think and feel, see, hear, say and do, pains and gains. The map conveys feelings, emotions and fears in ways that are often overlooked by other frameworks in design thinking. This tool helps point out the hidden needs of our target consumer and provides insights.
The sales pitch was developed to capture the consumer's existing frustrations that the concept was founded on. The storyline showed how Au Kurate is able to improve the user’s experience and connect her to the right service and product through an online platform.