Personal Project

Foreo for You Onboarding

Redesigned Foreo’s app branding and onboarding to help reduce the drop-off rate and keep users on the app.

Overview

🧖🏻‍♀️ Facial cleansing dreams and user experience nightmares

As an absolute skincare obsessive, I was thrilled to open my Christmas present and see the Foreo Luna 3 facial cleansing tool. Although I already owned its main competitor, the Clarisonic Mia, I was excited to try it after hearing rave reviews about the product. My mother and I both excitedly rushed to the bathroom to test it out. However, our excitement soon turned sour and eventually went from irritation to downright disappointment. To use the product, you had to use the app. The only problem was- the app was terrible, offensively bad. My mother decided to return hers while I kept mine, hoping that something could be salvaged. Foreo is consistently on the top 10 lists of best facial cleansing brushes. The product must be good. The product should work. It was all just coming down to the app.

👀 Discovery & Research

To understand the user’s problems and needs, I began with a deep comb through of the reviews on both the product and the app. The app had a shocking 1.8/5 stars on the app store. To extract useful feedback and find common patterns and themes, I created an affinity diagram with the comments.

Most of the reviews and comments fell into the following three categories:

1. 🙃 Love the product, hate the app

Most reviews fell under this category. The users loved the device itself but loathed the app so much that they decided to ditch it. The app’s bad experience soiled the enjoyment of the entire product.

2. 🤬 Bad Word of Mouth

This is where the real trouble begins. Users were so unhappy with their product experience that they used platforms to spread the word that the product was faulty or bad. Some even swore to tell everyone to stay clear from buying the product.

3. 💡Helpful Insights

Finding constructive criticisms in the reviews was a great find! Often users know that they dislike the product but not why. Many Foreo users put to words some of the most important pain points of the app.

What’s the real issue?

Who wants to use their phone with wet hands? Users should be only using the app to choose their settings for their unique needs. They should not need to rely on their phone to start and stop the device with wet soapy hands. Forcing users to use the app in this way makes the user feel as though their needs have not been thought of or catered to. The device is waterproof and advertised as being able to be used in the shower. That’s great for folks who like to wash their face in the shower — but not for folks who don’t want to bring their phone into the shower with wet hands.

Moreover, users felt frustrated that they were promised an app that would help them customize their skincare routine but were left with an app that has confusing and arbitrary settings.

✨ The Solution

I redesigned the onboarding flow to prioritize device registration, user skin needs, and behavioral design process patterns in mind. My solution optimizes and eases the user through a renewed onboarding flow, asking about their distinct needs and concerns. This gives users the encouragement and feedback that the app and device are capable of customizing itself to what they need. With the goal of increasing user engagement along with the onboarding flow, I added progress bars to create a sense of security for where they are at in the onboarding process.

At the end of the flow, I suggested settings the user could try based on their inputs, giving them an immediate starting point in the app that they then can customize later. I also gave them the ability to favorite their favorite settings to set their device to. This is with the intention that the device would always be set to a setting you have defined in the app, and you no longer need it to start or stop the device.

📱 Key Takeaways

Knowing your user is key.

• Discovery helps to identify what your users want from your product and what they anticipate it is able to do

• Understanding the audience’s motivations will help craft the messaging and content within the app

• Rapid testing concepts before starting development can save time and money with data-driven decisions

It is clear the way the original app was marketed did not align with the way the app actually functioned. This left users frustrated and feeling as the app is a useless part of the process. In the worst case, it hinders the user from using the product. Both redesigning and using the Foreo app and product gave me a perspective of what it felt like to use something that wasn’t made with you in mind. Coming back from Japan, it was a shock to use something that felt so careless. I hope to take this experience into my future work to remember what being a designer is all about — users first.