Challenge
NaturCycle is a start-up beauty brand that turns hair and nail clippings into skincare. The client’s brief listed ten app features but skipped the harder question: why would anyone hand something personal to a brand-new company, and then do it again? 79% of people are sceptical of beauty brands’ sustainability claims. The features were never the problem. Trust was.
Insight
A walk-and-talk interview deleted more of my assumptions than it confirmed. Reward points turned a meaningful act into “a Sephora punch card”, and community never came up once in an hour of think-aloud. The participant wanted proof, not persuasion: “Vague numbers are what greenwashing does.”
Process
Fourteen weeks: a competitive analysis of four brands against nine criteria, secondary research, assumptive and validated personas and empathy maps, a walk-and-talk interview, three rounds of site maps, a journey map, crazy eights, a simulated A/B test, eight wireframes kept in greyscale, then high-fidelity screens and an interactive prototype.
Solution
An app that makes participation the product. Recycling is a main tab, a first submission takes under two minutes and never asks a question the user can’t answer, and every claim is backed by a live state and a number traced to the user’s own material. The shop waits until that trust is earned.
Outcome
A working prototype of the validated flow and a usability test plan (five moderated and twelve unmoderated participants) that measures trust before and after a first submission. My biggest lesson: research is only useful if you let it delete your work.
