SEPHORA

Connecting Clients and Sephora Beauty Advisors in Store

As manager of a small but mighty product design team, I led several multi-year, omnichannel design initiatives for Sephora's e-commerce and Beauty Insider loyalty and community programs. Spearheading the design of the Cast Companion iOS app, to be used by Sephora Beauty Advisors (members of in-store "cast") in their daily routines providing beauty services and assistance to store clients, was a true highlight in my Sephora tenure.

In 2017 Sephora's Store Digital team introduced two iPhone-based apps, creating digital workflows for cast members to provide makeovers and skincare consultations. The Digital Makeover Guide and Digital Skincare Guide were standalone apps, not connected to each other or to other e-commerce or store systems, aside from the ability to retrieve a client's Beauty Insider profile. The Cast Companion (working title) was conceived as a means of tying these applications together, and extending them with more robust functionality to increase cast productivity in working with clients. Ultimately, also, to increase attributable store sales.

Kicking off a year-long project started with design framing, in close collaboration with the product, research and engineering leads. What would make the cut for MVP for this app? Input poured in from executive stakeholders in Store Operations, Education, Innovation, and other areas of the business.

First and foremost, we agreed on user adoption as the primary KPI, enforcing a highly user-centered approach. In store, a very human relationship between customer and staff is at play—our new app must support and enhance this dynamic, without introducing weird friction, or slowing the cast member down in any way.

A key part of my framing involved identifying major workflows for the MVP, which I categorized as specialized or global, below. Many productivity workflows were taken into consideration; the resulting set balanced tasks commonly carried out by task members (discovered through cast interviews) with technical feasibility. As with any new smartphone app, backend development is always top of mind.

And I produced a governing set of Design Principles:

Our team working in a relatively waterfall development methodology, I mapped out the design arc along a timeline.

To kick off our discovery I facilitated a collaborative design session based on a "day in the life" cast member narrative. Several weeks in, our team had generated early concepts, which our researcher took into the field on store visits. In the meantime our engineering leadership had connected with Apple's Enterprise Design Lab to organize an Apple-hosted 3 day design sprint. A large cohort of Sephora stakeholders, project team members, and in-store staff collectively generated a "golden thread" narrative and iterated through designs in low to medium fidelity. These designs both validated and extended the initial approach.

In the spring of 2018, after some deployment testing and research the Cast Companion piloted in six stores—not without some technical hiccups! With a warm reception by Beauty Advisors, and many rounds of bug fixes, the app continued to a wider deployment and eventual all-store rollout, eventually being renamed as the Sephora Advisor Assistant.