Bridging Business Goals and User Needs in E-Commerce Design

The beauty e-commerce experience often falls short in helping users, especially those with sensitive skin or specific preferences. While online shopping offers convenience and variety, many users still feel uncertain about product suitability, shade accuracy, and ingredient safety. Users frequently reported:
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● Doubts about online color accuracy
● Limited product filtering by skin needs
● Lack of product information clarity
● Distrust of new or unfamiliar brands

Design an e-commerce platform that feels personal and inclusive by tailoring the experience to each user’s preferences, skin type, and beauty goals. Offer smart product recommendations that simplify decision-making, especially for users with skin sensitivities, by highlighting ingredients, customer reviews, and reliable information.

I chose the Double Diamond design process because it offers a clear, structured framework that balances exploration and focus. It allowed me to open up and deeply understand the user's needs before narrowing down to a targeted, user-centered solution. The four phases — Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver — gave me space to think broadly, identify real user pain points, and confidently build a solution that aligns with user and business goals.

How it fits the VIVVA project?
The Double Diamond framework aligns well with e-commerce projects like VIVVA by enforcing a disciplined approach to both problem space exploration and solution space validation. Its initial phases prioritize comprehensive user research and precise problem definition, uncovering critical pain points such as product discoverability and trust barriers. The subsequent development and delivery phases emphasize iterative design, prototyping, and usability testing, ensuring the final solution optimizes user experience and conversion metrics while meeting strategic business objectives.

To better understand beauty shoppers’ behaviors and frustrations, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 5 participants, including college students, makeup enthusiasts, and a professional freelance makeup artist. The goal was to explore their shopping habits, motivations, and pain points with existing online cosmetics platforms.

- What are the key factors that motivate users to shop for cosmetics online?
- What aspects of the online shopping experience are most important to our users?
- What are users' current pain points and challenges when shopping for cosmetics online?
- What opportunities exist to improve the online shopping experience for our users?
- How do users currently discover and choose cosmetics products online?
- What factors influence our users’ decision-making process?

To better understand industry standards and identify opportunities for innovation, I conducted a competitive analysis of leading cosmetics e-commerce platforms using the SWCDUXO framework. This allowed me to break down each website across multiple UX dimensions and extract actionable insights to guide VIVVA’s product direction.

Based on insights gained from user interviews, I identified two primary personas that represent the key user segments VIVVA aims to serve. These personas guided my design decisions by keeping real user goals, frustrations, and behaviors at the core of the process. As I uncovered new insights throughout the project, I continuously iterated and refined the personas to better reflect the evolving needs and expectations of the target users.

To deepen my understanding of user behaviors and emotions, I created empathy maps for each persona using insights from user interviews. These maps helped me visualize what users see, think, feel, and do throughout their beauty shopping journey, and guided me in identifying pain points and opportunities.

Customer journey mapping allowed me to step beyond isolated user actions and see the entire shopping experience as a connected flow. By charting what users do, think, and feel across each stage — from initial discovery to post-purchase — I was able to uncover friction points, unmet needs, and opportunities for delight.

For an e-commerce brand, this approach is critical: it bridges business goals (loyalty, conversion, retention) with user expectations (trust, convenience, personalization). The resulting insights not only highlighted where users struggle but also revealed where design interventions could directly create value — simplifying product discovery, building trust through transparency, and encouraging repeat purchases.

Building on the insights from empathy and journey mapping, I translated user pain points into How Might We (HMW) questions. These questions reframed challenges as opportunities, enabling a wide exploration of potential solutions through a feature jamming session. Finally, I applied prioritization techniques to select the most impactful features — those that would best align with user needs, business goals, and technical feasibility.

To ensure the experience feels intuitive and frictionless, I structured the product around a clear, goal-driven information architecture. The hierarchy was designed to reflect users’ mental models, making it easy for them to navigate, discover products, and take action without cognitive overload.

To ensure that the platform supports users in reaching their goals with minimal friction, I created detailed user flows for the key scenarios: browsing products, checking out, trying AI tools, and exploring community-driven spaces.
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The flows highlight decision points and possible paths, helping to identify where users might face friction and where guidance or features are most valuable. By mapping these journeys early, I was able to design an experience that feels both seamless for first-time visitors and efficient for returning users.
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These flows also served as a foundation for later stages—informing the wireframes and ensuring consistency between the intended experience and the final interface.

I turned concepts and user flows into tangible sketches, quickly exploring layouts, interactions, and interface ideas. These early visual experiments let me test multiple approaches, spot potential friction, and refine the experience before committing to wireframes. Sketching ensured every design decision was purposeful, user-centered, and aligned with the platform’s goals, bridging strategy and execution seamlessly.

Building on the sketches, I translated concepts into wireframes to define the structure, layout, and hierarchy of the interface. Wireframing allowed me to visualize content placement, interactions, and user flow in a more concrete way, ensuring clarity and consistency across the platform. These wireframes served as a blueprint for the final design, making sure every element supported the user’s goals and the overall experience.

In the Design phase, I brought the structure and wireframes to life by defining the visual language of the platform. This included color palette selection, typography, and high-fidelity screens that reflect the brand’s personality while ensuring clarity, accessibility, and a seamless user experience. Every element was carefully crafted to support usability, guide user attention, and create a cohesive, engaging interface.

For typography, I chose Helvetica for its clarity, neutrality, and versatility. To maintain consistent spacing and alignment, I applied an 8pt scaling system across headings, subheadings, body text, and buttons. This ensures content is legible across devices, guides users’ attention, and keeps the interface clean, structured, and cohesive.

With the visual system and typography in place, I translated the wireframes into high-fidelity screens that showcase the final look and feel of the platform. These screens reflect the brand personality, user-centered interactions, and polished interface elements, while demonstrating how the design choices from layout to color and type—come together to create a seamless and engaging user experience.

This project pushed me to grow as a designer in many ways. I learned how to conduct deep user research and translate insights into a user-centered design that also aligns with business goals.
More importantly, I realized the value of thinking like a product designer, not just focusing on visuals. Balancing user needs with business objectives gave me a better perspective on how design contributes to the bigger picture.
Overall, this project helped me strengthen my ability to work end-to-end from research, to ideation, to crafting a solution that’s both usable and impactful.