Project Overview

Client: Sephora, a multinational beauty product retailer
Industry: SaaS, Beauty, B2C Products
Timeline: 6 weeks (2024)
My Role: Lead Product Designer

Ora set out to reimagine Sephora’s customer experience through an intelligent conversational interface. I designed a CUI that simplifies product discovery and guidance, aligning with Sephora’s vision for more intuitive, personalized beauty interactions.

Problem Space

At Sephora, the experience can feel overwhelming with so many products and trends. The store is filled with numerous choices, and there’s often confusion from the influence of social media trends. When shopping for foundation or concealer online, matching shades can be difficult and cause uncertainty. This brings us to the project's research question:

How can we optimize the users' shopping experience to significantly increase their satisfaction in selecting products from a diverse range of options using a Conversational Assistant?

A conversational assistant for this project has the following features:

• Personalized assistance from Cast members

• Positive, gender-neutral and uplifting

• Friendly, warm and honest 

Integrates Sephora's proprietary Color iQ technology for shade matching

Product Demo

Design and Research Schema

Through user journey mapping and discussions with Cast Members, we identified that users often turn to social media and peers, influenced by unrealistic beauty standards.

How can we provide more authentic, personalized guidance? Our goal is to offer tailored recommendations that celebrate individual style and beauty, shifting away from idealized standards and fostering a more positive and authentic shopping experience.

The team identified key stakeholders in the system, mapped information architecture for the CUI (Conversational User Interface), and also referenced Sephora's brand guidelines for the design intervention.

I created User personas and identified opportunities in their current journey to facilitate the use of Ora CUI.

CUI Character and Motion States Design

We designed motion states for the CUI, mapping them on a matrix of Excited, Positive, Dull, and Negative emotions. These states shape ORA’s tone, conveying messages without words. Our focus was on aligning with the user's mental model, ensuring intuitive representations of speaking, listening, loading, and error states.

Design Solution

For our second persona, I also designed a desktop browser Conversational Interface for Sephora's existing website.

Reflections

Through this project,

• I learned how overwhelming beauty shopping can feel, and how much confidence people gain when guidance feels personal and non-judgmental.

• I realized that decision-making in beauty isn’t just about products — it’s emotional, cultural, and tied to self-expression.

• Prototyping ORA showed me how small interactions (tone, language, nudges) can dramatically shift trust and comfort in a crowded space like Sephora.

• I saw the potential of expanding beyond product suggestions toward experiences — appointments, makeovers, routines — that support people holistically.

• Most importantly, I understood how technology can reduce choice anxiety and help people feel seen, empowered, and informed in spaces that often feel intimidating.