Designing with Zoā

I was hired as a freelancer by Zoā, a skincare company based in Morocco. The startup needed help with designing their website prior to the official launch of their beauty products.

Role: Lead UI/UX Designer
Duration: August 2022 to February 2023 (6 months)
Tools: Figma

Company website: https://zoabeauty.com/

Main Responsibilities & Tasks:

I was responsible for building over 50+ wireframes for the company's desktop and mobile site. These wireframes included landing pages, individual product pages, error screens, contact forms, and more. The site currently supports three languages: English, French, and Arabic.
I created prototypes for desktop and mobile to demonstrate various task flows so that the team could better visualize how the site and its features would function. I also provided walkthroughs of prototypes to team members and the company founders.
Every week, I attended virtual meetings with the Head of Business Development and Front-End Developer to share progress, discuss deadlines, and keep track of goals. During these meetings, I provided and received constructive feedback regarding theoretical design ideas vs. reality.
After our team gathered feedback from usability testing and surveys, I was responsible for taking findings and incorporating design changes to improve the overall user experience.

Challenges:

Design & implementation - As the sole designer, I communicated frequently with our Front-End Developer to go over design ideas and changes. Through these discussions, I developed a better understanding of what designs are easy or difficult to implement. I'm really glad that I had the opportunity to receive feedback from a developer's point of view as it challenged me to be more mindful when designing and consider how it will be implemented. This made the hand-off much smoother in the end for our developer.
Working with different languages - Prior to this project, I had never made designs in other languages besides English. Working with French wasn't too difficult, but Arabic was challenging for me at first since they use a different writing system and they read from right to left. To make sure that the site's content would feel natural to Arabic users, I took time to browse and study other Arabic cosmetic and e-commerce sites. I also consulted our Arabic translator to get suggestions for font styling and sizing so that text would be comfortable to read.

Outcomes:

Positive user feedback - Many users provided positive feedback during usability testing as well as after the site was made accessible to the public. It was very satisfying to hear from the company founders as well that they loved the clean appearance and flow of the site.
Increased user engagement - I continued to make adjustments to the design based off feedback we received and after some time, our analytics showed that users were spending more time on pages compared to before.

I really enjoyed designing for Zoā and also had an amazing experience with the team members there. I went into the project thinking that I would just be getting more experience with creating desktop and mobile sites, but instead was able to learn about designing while keeping other languages and cultures in mind.