Beauty Pie
Leading the design and delivery of the first iOS app for Beauty Pie
🏆 Ranked 1st in the Shopping category of App Store
why an app?
From interviews many customers enquired and asked for an easier access to Beauty Pie – they expected to be abe to have a Beauty Pie app
Having a native app would allow us to be more present in the life of our members. We knew email opening rates were quite low.
An app could open up a world of possibilities. First of all the opportunity to give our customer a personalised shopping experience.
Some numbers & Benchmarking
Opportunity size
- Around 45K (57%) of our members use iOS, so in line with above, we’d expect:
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- 20% to have the app installed in the first 5 weeks
- 50% to have the app installed in the first 3 months
Return Rate
On average, our members return once every 26 days and shop once every 57 days (source). For the initial launch, with a shopping experience and one killer feature, we expect this to go down slightly, but the long term goal is for members to visit a minimum of twice a month and place 2 more, bringing the shops from 5 a year to 7.
Uninstall rate
The industry average is 28% in 30 days, but due to the engagement levels of our members, we’d expect this to sit lower at 10%.
App store rating
The aim for our physical product is to have a star rating of 4.5+, we aim for 4.8 with app. Currently sitting at 4.7 🚀
The Pretzel way 🥨
At the beginning we encountered some issues on the process. This is how we fixed it
Having a share knowledge of priorities and direction made it easier to handle the confusion.
Everyone in the team was informed of what the design and the interactions were so they were able to spot differences and bugs.
When we onboarded our very own EM we tackled the process confusion straight on. We had some retros to uncover more urgent problems and added sessions we needed to align and move faster.
Example: design-dev review before release, refinement sessions on specific areas of the app)
Most importantly we kept aligned and communicated honestly and kept in mind we were all doing our best! 
Some other issues we faced
We had to work closely with backend to ensure all the API calls were able to connect to the app and they were fetching the right data
Since there was no app we couldn’t rely on analytics, so we got the web ones and kept in mind users have different behaviours and scenarios when approaching website and apps.
Because all the API were created for Web we had to make some specific choices in term of experience in the app. But we kept pushing for the best one for our customer coming to a middle ground with the engineers.
Managing stakeholders
How we ensured user needs were at the forefront of our decisions when stakeholders pushed for specific solutions?
Member Price
A good example is the visual treatment for member and non-member price. We spent some time debating how to show the member prices in the app. We had legacy from the web, very passionate stakeholders and our opinion. To solve this in the best possible way I brought it to UserTesting. I set up an unmoderated test with our members and asked a simple questions: “what do you think this prices represent?”
With labels
Without Labels
So where do we start?
Commercial tool
At the very basic we needed the app to be a shopping tool. This would bring the minimum value to our customers and an additional (hopefully better) stream of revenue for the Business.
Needed functionality
Amongst the commercial aspect we also needed to figure out specific device capabilities and behaviours like notifications and log in flow.
Nice to have
If we had capabilities we’d include some delight factor to the MVP like a touch of “better” to the basic interactions.
The future
Because of the timeline We had to constantly evaluate what we could keep and what would go in the “after launch” bucket.
my process
Competitor Analysis
As a first direction I audited and analysed many competitors.
Baymard Institute
I took full advantage of the access to the Baymard Institute to save time testing and understanding better practices.
Customer feedback
When in doubt I would refer to the customers either with user interviews or with unmoderated tests to inform my designs and bring the customer voice to the discuss.
results & highlights
of users is coming back on app every week.
Average Push notification open. Versus 1.80% email CTR.
Additional member (3% of member base) reached through notification, otherwise unreachable through other channels.
other responsibilities
Because of the nature of the app I had to re-organise the navigation and the information architecture making sure whe had all the content and that we could get the backend to feed us the correct information.
We created a new Design System to allow iOS developers and the design team to talk the same language. We set up a Parade app to ensure consistency throughout the whole app
After the launch of the MVP I created several business cases to showcase the value and the ROI of some app specific features like the compare feature, the skincare cabinet (organise feature) and the track feature.