The K-beauty
Shifts to North America

Mrs. Hong is an inspiring Korean entrepreneur of Truezyme®, an all-natural skin care brand. As a women, I have no doubt to join her team and introduce those amazing products to the US market. I believe that design thinking is a concept and have to be applied case-by-case. On this page, I will provide the details about why I choose each methods and what exactly I did for accomplishing the mission. - TL;DR This project touched/included cross culture, design guidelines, information architecture, design system, e-commerce website, SEO (search engine optimization), and Liquid (a template language created by Shopify).

my role

product designer

I applied the design thinking to overcome this complex project.

I created design guidelines and design system to generate mockups. The mockups provided visual details and brand identity, which are useful for gathering stakeholders’ perspectives and communicating with developer.

Also, I identified users’ needs and business objectives to generate the information architecture. The results helped UX writer to generate suitable contents.

E-commerce website developer

In this project, I seized the chance to push my skills. I followed design mockups and built the e-commerce website on Shopify.

In order to implement the design, I self-learned the Liquid theme language and customized the existing theme.

Challenge

Misinformation

Cultural factors influence design. The information could be interpreted inaccurately due to languages, local terminologies, social conditions, and customs.

Truezyme® produced products with scientific process and natural ingredients. Those contents are hard to understand. Besides, the international e-commerce website presented the brand’s concepts, technical terms and contents in an incomprehensible way.

Challenge

Tight Budget

Truezyme®, as a start-up with very little capital, has to run the business immediately. Growing the business and earning customers’ trust is our first priority.

The challenges is releasing the functional e-commerce website and costing down the expenses simultaneously.

discover

Heuristic Evaluation

Heuristic Evaluation is a useful method for Truezyme® because the research budget is very limited. I found some issues without having to test with participants. The workbook from NN Group is handy!

Heuristic #1 - The checkout function didn’t work. The User didn’t receive any feedback after submit the order.
Heuristic #8 - The information in each product page are presented image-by-image. For the user shop on a website, it took 33 scrolls to read a page. Which means the volume of information in a page is too massive to digest.

A screenshot of SEO and keywords report.

Understandable Keywords (SEO)

The content and terms were translated from Korean to English. However, they were hard to understand. So I considered the North American culture and did the relevant keywords research.

This step provided a good insight for Truezyme®’s website. As an expert of e-commerce, I know the ranking is the key of e-commerce selling.

competitor analysis

My team listed competitors and I reviewed those competitors’ website and user flows. The list is sufficient because we have marketing strategy, attorney and photographer on our team.

define

Persona

It is no doubt to create a persona for our team. Because we have team member from Korea, the persona helped them understood the customer in US smoothly.

📮 Details are available upon request. Just message me!

Customer journey

Although the customer journey is highly similar with other e-commerce shopping journey, I still created a customer journey for my team to got a picture about the flow on our website.

It also helped some team members, who didn’t have e-commerce operating experience, to put their eye on the flow, not just the visual parts.

site map

The site map helped with communication between team members involved in developing the site.

This map also identify the areas that have been missed at an early stage.

Ideate

mood board

The mood board is a good way for communicating with the brand founder.

It visually showed feelings and values that I should create.

sketching

I used to draw down all my pop-up ideas. I love the sketching part.

Sketching is simple and it deliver either the information or the structure clearly.

design

I created the design guidelines and design system.
The mockups below provided developer with a detailed visual reference.

Design System - Styles (color)

A screenshot of design system - style and color.

Design System - components

Mockup - the All Products Page

Mockup - the account detail Page

A screenshot of the account detail Page.

mockup - the product detail page (Shampoo)

A screenshot of the product detail page (Shampoo).

limitation & business model

Setup the e-commerce Business!

Due to a limited budget, Truezyme® decided to start the e-commerce business on Shopify.

We decided to have a Shopify plugin to provide subscription program. Truezyme® has daily-essential products including shampoo, tonic, body wash, body lotion, etc. This subscription program will create a hassle-free experience for the user and scale the business faster simultaneously. It’s a win-win!

Develop

Self-learned - the Liquid language