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Learning before building
Ulta Beauty · In-store kiosk research and design
A customer survey, paper sketches, and prototype testing helped shape a new in-store experience before we invested in the finished interface. The kiosk reached a store pilot during peak COVID, when shoppers were reluctant to touch a shared screen. The pilot ended there.
My role: Lead UX designer, responsible for early customer research, paper prototyping, and the interactive prototype.
Start with what would make it useful
We were asked to design an interface for a new kiosk to be piloted in a few Ulta Beauty stores. Before deciding where everything should go on a screen, I wanted to know whether customers would use it—and what they would expect it to do.
I partnered with our email marketing team to send a survey to a few thousand customers. We asked about their likelihood of using a kiosk, asked them to rank possible features, and left room for needs we hadn’t considered. Their responses helped define the feature set.
We also visited retailers with digital experiences in their stores. Watching how people approached those screens helped us think about the setting around our own. I wrote about that afternoon in Sometimes the research is a field trip.
A sketch is enough to start a conversation
Rather than spend days building a polished prototype, I sketched the screens on paper. I asked colleagues outside the project team to imagine themselves shopping in a store, then used open-ended questions to explore their first impressions and expectations.
Those quick internal sessions gave me an inexpensive first pass at the labels and arrangement. I then built a more developed, partially functional prototype and tested it with customers. The early feedback meant there was less to revise at that stage.
Make feedback easier to ask for
The useful lesson extended beyond the kiosk. Surveys and paper prototypes made it practical to gather feedback while an idea was still taking shape. They took little time and cost little to run, which helped build an appetite for research earlier in the design process.
People don’t need a finished interface to tell you what they expect. Sometimes a rough drawing gives them a better opening to question the idea.
The pilot met a different world
The kiosk reached an in-store pilot during peak COVID. Shoppers were reluctant to touch shared screens, and the pilot ended without further iteration.
That context matters when interpreting the outcome. Low use during that period could not, on its own, tell us whether the features and interface met shoppers’ needs. It did bring the physical setting into sharp focus: an experience has to fit the conditions in which someone is being asked to use it.
The research helped us make design decisions before the build. The pilot’s timing limited what we could learn about adoption. Both belong in the story.