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01 Intro


I’ve always been personally very invested in my skincare but had only recently began learning about Korean beauty products. As I learned more about K-beauty products, I felt inundated by the sheer variety of brands and ingredients that I’ve never seen before. K-beauty is one of the fastest growing sectors in the US beauty market. Asia is known for their emphasis on skincare, including affordable yet high-quality treatments and products. 

K-beauty is well known in Asia, but relatively unfamiliar in the US. Non-Koreans who are looking to get into K-beauty often feel overwhelmed. Information is hard to find outside of recommendations via Youtube and Reddit.

02 Research 


When setting out to conduct research, my goal was to better understand people’s experiences with Korean beauty products within their skincare routine. How did people in the US learn about K-beauty products in the first place? Where do they purchase these products? Are they interested in learning more?


03 Define

︎︎︎ User Personas & Problem Statements  

With the information learned from my research, I developed three personas as potential users of Bloom. The target demographic is young professionals aged 18-30 interested in skincare, with an average budget to spend on products (from $1-100 per month).


After conducting my primary and secondary research, I created specific “How Might We” statements to better reframe and define the problem.
  1. How might we help skincare novices find Korean beauty products less foreign or strange? 
  2. How might we help skincare novices feel less overwhelmed when narrowing down and selecting products for their skincare routine? 
  3. How might we assist people in easily changing up their skincare routines and discovering suitable new products?

︎︎︎ Site Map, User Flows, and Task Flows

I decided on the crucial features for early prototyping and created a site map to determine hierarchy and layout of the website. These features were later tweaked in later prototypes and redundant features were reworked. My main feature of this website was the onboarding quiz + personalization of the website for the user, so I drew up a user flow for how one would take the onboarding quiz. It was difficult to slot in where the login / signup page should be, but ultimately I decided to do it after the onboarding quiz, so not to present a hurdle upon immediate arrival onto the website. 





04 Branding & UX/UI Design


︎︎︎ Branding

For the brand design of the website, I wanted to go for a bright, colorful, playful vibe. I designed a bubbly flower logo and chunky logos to match the same aesthetic. I went with warm, bold colors and a clean sans serif font accented by a more elaborate serif font.

︎︎︎ Sketches & Wireframes

See below for some of my sketches for the low-fidelity prototypes. I drew inspiration from retail marketplaces for beauty products, sticking to a layout that users should be familiar with. I then created mid-fidelity wireframes for the four different flows to see if the features & task flows that I’ve created made sense for the website.