ULTA BEAUTY
Innovative Design
December 2018
Ulta is a chain of beauty stores carrying cosmetics, hair care, and skin care. Ulta had recently been recognized as a Fortune 500 company when I joined their UX team in early 2018. In addition to its wide variety of retail options, Ulta offers in-store salon services. My role on the team as an interaction designer was to help innovate Ulta’s online booking platform.
Enhancing the User Experience
The goal of this project was to enable Ulta’s clientele and employees to more easily book and manage salon appointments. In order to make this happen, Ulta partnered with Spruce, an enterprise solution for online booking and appointment management. The partnership presented two main design challenges:
- Translate the UX of the Spruce software from the small business format for which it was created to an experience tailored specifically for a large retailer with hundreds of stores and a wider variety of services.
- Incorporate Ulta’s recent brand overhaul seamlessly into clean and appealing visual designs across all digital platforms.
Visual Design
When the project began, Ulta had recently overhauled their brand, introducing an entirely new design system including compliant brand colors, typographic styles, and patterns. My role on the UX team was to translate low fidelity wireframes into compelling mockups consistent with Ulta’s brand standards and accessibility guidelines. Photography selection was guided by a focus on diversity and authenticity, emphasizing real, everyday people over unrealistic beauty standards.
Contextual Inquiry
The UX team had the opportunity to observe Ulta salon employees using the booking and appointment management software to understand how we could improve the usability of the designs. Watching our interviewees struggle to find the information they need in the trading summary lead to the redesign of the employee-facing dashboard.
Results
The outcome of the project is an intuitive and streamlined experience that allows clients and employees to manage appointments across all screen sizes and devices. This prototype demonstrates the scenario of a client booking a salon service.
