Sephora Universe
Client & Industry
Sephora
Retail
Timeframe
Dec 2022 - Jan 2024
Role
Product Designer
Creative Lead
UI/UX Designer
Team
Cross-functional partnership between Design, 3D Production, and Marketing.
Context

I lead creative direction and design of various features in Sephora Universe, focusing on play, tangibility, and exploration. One was an interactive product display that elevated beauty discovery & education into an immersive experience for visitors.

Context & Challenge
Sephora Universe is a virtual platform for product exploration, beauty, and brand experiences. They needed to showcase each 3D product in a beautiful, engaging, and scalable way to be reused for thousands of products of all the brands on the Sephora site.
Design Strategies

It's more than just an interactive product.
Allowing players to have influence over their experience in 3D creates a world that elevates emotional impact and memorability.

1. Gamified Exploration
Visitors can explore Product Display Pages (PDPs) in a fun way and play as a way to learn about products. They are rewarded in game by interacting with hotspots.
2. Elevate product tangibility
The capabilities of 3D should be used to reveal aspects of the product that can't be seen in-store. For example, seeing effects or ingredients fly out of the product, like lemon slices for this Sephora lemon extract face mask.
3. discover information with Agency
Visitors should have agency to read and discover secondary information if they want to. For example, cinematic mode allows you to watch a video about the product in a focused setting.
4. Education as a conversation
Interactive Beauty Advisors were incorporated as a conversational feature within the PDP to keep the informative dialogue of in-store beauty advisors.
5. Using AI to Streamline creative direction
 AI concept generation allowed me to capture the appropriate lighting, colours, assets around the product, and composition of the PDP to communicate the vision to our 3D team quickly.
Conclusion

Focusing on fun and rewarding experiences leads to product discoverability naturally, while empowering customers to explore their own journeys and stories.

Results
10x Engagement Time
From our research and testing, engagement time with digital products increased by over 10 times its original play testing length, by adding discoverable interactions.
Scalibility for Thousands of Products
Product display pages now have a template to be scaled for all products from brands on the platform.
Increased Conversion
Sephora customers were led to the brand experiences or Sephora website from the product display pages.
More Sephora Universe
In addition to Product Display Pages, I worked on designing UI/UX throughout the platform, creative direction for all of the NPCs (like Beauty Advisors and other avatars), and designing gameplay for the Sephora Face Mask Race mini game.
Note: Due to the confidential nature of most of my projects, access to full design processes can be shared by request.
Next Project
One Little Planet
About
Work
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©Allison Chan 2024