Youth to the People is a Prograde, vegan skincare company, using unconventional superfood ingredients backed by innovative science to yield powerful, clean results in their products. All products are made in California, with consciously sourced ingredients, and verified supply chains that don’t negatively impact the environment. Packaging is fully recyclable.

Sounds like an amazing company, right? Right! We wanted to make sure their customers were aware of this too so that they can feel confident in their buying decisions. A redesign of their information architecture on the homepage, alongside a new quiz feature to help select correct products for their needs, made this happen.

My Roles:

UX Researcher

UX/UI Designer

Web Designer

In developing the problem statement, we wanted to keep user goals front and center. The question that kept coming up, was how adults landed on the products they use daily in such a saturated market. With the onslaught of marketing through social media, it can be difficult to decipher which products will suit your needs, resulting in many people just giving up. We wanted to focus our research and design around solving that problem.

Young adults want to feel empowered to maintain their skin’s health with a consistent routine without being overwhelmed by a highly saturated market.

Building out the interview questions was key; understanding shopper’s experiences and thought processes when searching for products would ultimately lead us in the direction of finding the solution to our problem statement. We kept the questions more broad in order to fully understand the scope of what the project might look like.

Interview Questions:

Can you walk me through what your typical skincare routine looks like?

Can you tell me about the last time you shopped for new skincare products?

Can you tell me about a time when you purchased a new skincare product you ended up loving?

If there’s one thing you could change that would make it easier to shop for skincare, what would it be? 

Responses from the interviews showed that people really care about skincare, and about who and what they’re supporting with their purchases. The struggles people run into mainly center around education, and in a highly saturated market, not knowing what to target, or what products are best to get the job done. Company ethics and transparency in ingredients are key for helping buyers feel confident and empowered.

In addition to our interviews, we collected data via a survey that garnered over 50 responses.

Survey Results:

When noting what is most important when looking for new skincare products, users care about reviews, dermatologist recommendations, clean Ingredients, company ethics, and branding and packaging.

We conducted a heuristic evaluation of the homepage to get a clearer idea of how the current Youth to the People site was failing to solve our user problem. Our main takeaways from this process was that the current homepage wasn’t passing accessibility testing and the design/layout felt clinical rather than innovative and fun like their branding design and photography direction.

Users expressed that clean ingredients, trustworthiness through brand transparency, and branding were all driving forces in why they chose to shop with a specific skincare company. In order to place more emphasis on these pieces that Youth to the People strongly embodies, we chose to adjust the Information architecture of the site to better encompass and showcase these elements.

The second piece to our high-fi prototyping was reiterations of the quiz feature that we built into the site. Youth to the People offers 15 minute free consultation sessions with dermatologists on their site, but not everyone wants to take the time or energy to schedule one of those sessions. In order to save users time and provide them with the direction, knowledge, and simplicity our research showed they wanted, we built out a short quiz.