eSalon | Lead Product Designer
Personalized Hair Care Quiz
Guiding customers from more choices to the right routine.
The challenge
Personalization only works if people are willing to complete the questions that make it possible.
Adding more questions can lead to better recommendations, but it also makes some people drop out. The opportunity was figuring out which questions were important, what could be assumed, and how to make each step feel like progress instead of a hassle.
Halfway through the project, company layoffs eliminated Product Management and UX Research, leaving me in charge of discovery as I gathered feedback from executives in Marketing, Engineering, Customer Service, and R&D.
My approach
Instead of starting from scratch, I focused on four key decisions that would shape the 0-to-1 experience.
Include only the questions that matter.
To identify which questions improved recommendations and which caused friction, I studied companies like Function of Beauty and Prose.
In my competitive audit of 19 personalization quizzes, I found that most included questions with no meaningful effect on the brand's recommendations.
Offer one quiz for three user types.
New customers, returning customers who aren’t logged in, and logged-in users all had different amounts of background information available before starting the quiz.
Instead of making everyone go through the same steps, I designed the experience to use existing profile data when possible. This way, users did less unnecessary work and didn’t have to log in or sign up just to get started.
Logged-in customers don’t want to repeat information you already have about them.
Build on aspects that are already effective.
Customers already trusted the hair color quiz. Instead of creating something completely new, I used proven interaction designs. I included progressive disclosure, made decisions simpler, and introduced a modern interface designed for hair care.
Make personalization feel genuine.
I built interactive prototypes in Figma, using variables and conditional prototyping to show customized recommendations and branching logic.
Experiencing the product was more effective than presenting static screens and helped align stakeholders before development.
Outcome
Good personalization asks only what matters.
This project laid the groundwork for eSalon’s personalized hair care experience, expanding a successful ecommerce model into a new product category and creating a recommendation system that could grow with the catalog.
I learned that personalization isn’t about asking more questions. It’s about asking the right questions at the right time and making sure each answer feels valuable.