L'Oréal LEVEL
UX Research, UX Design, UI Design
Enhancing the experience: Shop and earn rewards – exclusively for beauty professionals.
LEVEL
The L'Oréal LEVEL Rewards Program enables beauty professionals to earn points by purchasing products. Stylists can then redeem these points for rewards like additional products and educational classes. I was the product designer on this redesign initiative in the spring of 2021.
Platform: Web + Mobile
Team: Me + Additional UI Designer
Timeline: 6 weeks
The Brief
In our initial discussions with the L'Oréal team, they outlined their objectives for the LEVEL program and provided key site metrics. Their main priorities were encouraging users to gift points, redeem points before expiration through purchases, and sign up for classes. The scope for this phase included the following areas:
Home Page
Dashboard
Points & Expiration Schedule
Level & Points Activity
Redemption History
Gift your Points
Content Audit
Before diving in, I wanted to explore the current site myself and see if I could spot any potential hypotheses to test when I eventually got the chance to chat with the platform's users.
As shown below, the dashboard provides minimal information. I noted this because the page doesn't offer anything unique compared to other pages. It also fails to show users what they can purchase with their points or when their points will expire. I wondered if this might be contributing to what the L’Oréal team mentioned about users not spending their points prior to expiration.
A couple of other issues seemed evident as well:
The Home Page itself was not personalized to the user, even though the experience requires a login.
There was no explanation as to why you would want to gift your points to someone else, or if you would be rewarded for doing so.
There was very little content on the Points Expiration Schedule, Level & Points Activity, and Redemption History pages.
User Interviews
The first step was to gather feedback from LEVEL members. L'Oréal helped me recruit five users, each with at least six months of experience on the site, to share their thoughts.
I created a user interview guide and conducted the sessions via Google Meet, recording each meeting for reference.
Insights
New Additions
Users expressed a strong interest in seeing new SKUs featured on the home screen. They mentioned being familiar with the catalog and often visit the site specifically to check for new additions.
Redemption History
Hairstylists and aestheticians often reorder the same products regularly. They expressed a desire for easy access to their redemption history, allowing them to quickly repurchase items they need to restock.
Affordable Items
Users primarily visit the site to see how they can use their available points. However, they expressed frustration with the difficulty of understanding the points expiration schedule and what items are available within their current points balance.
Virtual Classes Spotlight
Users mentioned that they haven't signed up for classes recently due to COVID but would love to see virtual classes featured more prominently.
Taking Action
Using the analytics and pain points shared by L’Oréal, along with feedback from users, I began outlining a plan and creating rough sketches to envision the new experience. Of course, this was just a first draft to be tested later.
First things first… how might I make this simpler?
Here’s the plan:
Remove the “My Dashboard” screen, as it contains no unique content that couldn’t be displayed on the home screen after login.
Simplify the points activity experience by merging the Level & Points Activity, Points Expiration Schedule, and Redemption History. These are all essential components and related content that should be organized together.
Enhance the home page to be more personalized and engaging by featuring items based on past redemptions, highlighting upcoming virtual classes, and recommending products from preferred brands (which users can select in their preferences). Additionally, display items within the user's points range and indicate how many points are approaching expiration.
The stylists shared that they primarily used the point gifting feature to transfer points within their salon, allowing them to attend events together—usually led by the salon owner, who held the most points. This value proposition needed clearer communication and a more streamlined experience. Additionally, stylists would be more motivated to gift their points if they were notified that their points were nearing expiration.
Wireframes
All of the interview participants accessed the platform at work on their phones, so I opted for a mobile-first approach when creating the wireframes.
Testing our Prototype
The testing phase was a bit challenging because we didn’t overhaul the entire experience. While some pages had been updated earlier, others were deferred to later stages. However, we created a prototype and tested it with participants using Maze.
Let’s have users complete some common tasks and watch out for things like success/error rate, time to task, and subjective satisfaction via remote moderated usability testing.
Tasks:
Check how may points you have expiring at the end of next month.
Find a virtual class you would be interested in signing up for.
Find 3 products you can afford with your current points.
Find an item that you would like to reorder.
Gift points to a friend.
After gathering (mostly qualitative) data from the usability tests, we observed from the previous analytics:
time to task was down a median of 22%
Direct success rate was at 92%, with one user having success with one minor issue on only one task.
Every user talked about the improvements to the points system aloud as they completed the usability test.
The heat is on
At this point, we checked back in with the client to share our progress and findings. They gave the okay, but now we only had 10 days for UI work, as their developers soon had another project they needed to work on, and it had taken their team longer than expected to source interview participants, setting the timeline back.
Informed Improvements
Custom content
Enable users to tailor their brand preferences directly from the homepage for a more personalized content experience.
Expiring Points
Add expiring points to the hero section, as 2 users missed it and went to the menu to find it during testing.
Final UI
We faced a couple of constraints in this situation. First, we were under an intense time crunch. Additionally, since we didn’t redesign the entire experience, the footer and product cards had to remain unchanged.
Closing Thoughts
This project was a bit unique as it involved agency work, where timelines can sometimes be extended due to client coordination, unlike working solely with internal stakeholders. Despite that, it was still a fun and rewarding experience!
Since the launch of these updates, L'Oréal has seen some great results:
20% Less time spent on the home page
32% Increase in gifted points over 1 year
12% Increase in virtual class enrollment
@2024 Emma Hosn