L’Oréal /
La Roche-Posay
A digital coaching experience helping Gen Z build healthy skincare habits
Digital coaching experiences are opening up new ways for people to cultivate healthy habits.
L’Oréal wanted to build a robust coaching app for its dermatologist-backed skincare brand La Roche-Posay to help users establish a solid skincare routine and feel more confident in their skin.
Together, we created and launched L’Oréal’s first foray into the digital coaching space: Spotscan+ Coach, a personalised experience bringing together dermatology-backed skincare advice and daily support to help people manage their acne. It introduces mental health into a skincare app so users treat their skin as part of their overall wellness.
Spotscan+ Coach uses La Roche-Posay’s AI tool Spotscan+ to recommend a personalised skincare routine, while a fun, empowering science-driven coaching challenge and a delightfully-designed calendar tracker helps users stick with it. It’s building brand affinity with Gen Z and cutting through the Skintok noise with a multimedia library of trustworthy dermatologist advice and content from favourite influencers to keep them engaged.
What we did
The product is built for longevity and flexibility, able to update content without new launch versions and setting up L’Oréal for future digital experiences across its brands.
We began working with La Roche-Posay in a Discovery phase from May to September 2023, then brought the beta product to market with their team in a launch phase between January and September 2024. During this time, we:
- led design of the experience, look and feel of the app
- defined the coaching programme and content strategy
- carried out end-to-end UX/UI using La Roche-Posay’s design language
- led the front-end engineering team
- led a six-week beta
- built a backend infrastructure and CMS to integrate with L’Oréal’s existing systems and guidelines
Since bringing an MVP iOS app to the UK App Store in September 2024, we’re continuing our work alongside our peers at La Roche-Posay to build out the roadmap, planning for emerging business priorities and incorporating beta feedback.
This includes working on new features to enrich the MVP product and introducing an Android version to broaden our audience. It’s only the beginning!
The work between ustwo and L’Oréal has been an incredible team effort. The feedback from our closed beta has been extremely encouraging, highlighting the potential for this product to make a real difference in people’s lives.
We successfully accomplished the three main objectives in our beta testing phase:
1. Form strong skincare and wellbeing habits
90% of beta users said they were more motivated to be consistent with their skincare
2. Build brand equity with Gen Z audience
92% of beta users said using Spotscan+ Coach has had a positive impact on their perception of La Roche-Posay
3. Improve confidence and skin
74% of beta users felt their skin had improved
For digital coaching services to be successful and truly drive behaviour change, they need to be tunable, doable and renewable. Spotscan+ Coach ticks all the boxes.
Tunable: Make it personalised to meet the user’s specific needs.
The app recommends a personalised morning and evening skincare routine and sets up a user profile around specific issues like dryness. La Roche-Posay’s unique AI-powered tool Spotscan+, which analyses images of the user’s face to help determine their skin needs, is a key part of the onboarding experience.
Since it requires selfies in specific angles via the device camera, we’ve made sure Spotscan+ is accessible to sight-impaired users so everyone can get the right skincare advice - for instance, using Voiceover/TalkBack prompts and incorporating haptics.
Financial access was also a major consideration. Users can complete their routines with any products they can afford. So, while the brand’s products are the only ones recommended by name, the focus of the experience is on the essential skincare steps - people can use any products in their budget or bathroom vanity.
Doable: Show that behaviour change is possible with incremental steps towards an attainable goal.
Compliance is the biggest hurdle in skincare, as people often stop using products before they can see results, so La Roche-Posay wanted to get people to stick to their skincare routines for at least three months. But that might sound overwhelming to someone just beginning a new routine. To make it feel ‘doable’, the app sets users up for success with an onboarding experience designed with dermatologists to mimic an initial appointment (e.g., a basic rundown on acne, introducing a recommended routine).
Our early research showed that 21 days is a good (and less daunting) timeframe to build sticky habits. So we designed a three-week coaching ‘challenge’ that keep users motivated while demystifying skincare.
The routines are also doable: unlike much of the complex, product-heavy social media guidance, it’s four steps in the morning (don’t forget sunscreen!) and three at night. Users log when they’ve completed their routines in a simple tracker and calendar, which proved popular in beta testing with both skincare newbies and those who had established regimens.
To keep up the momentum for the crucial three-month period and beyond, we added a streaks feature to the calendar with fun animations to celebrate logging routines and motivational messaging (e.g., ‘you’re on a roll’ or ‘three perfect days this week’). Since launching the MVP, we’ve also incorporated beta users’ requests for routine reminders.
Renewable: Keep the user coming back with fresh content.
Spotscan+ Coach content is key to the experience. For instance, each day of the challenge has new information, snappy coaching tips and audio users can listen to while completing their skincare routines. Daily topics are strategically placed across the experience, like habit-focussed messaging on days behavioural science demonstrates high drop-off.
A multi-media library taps into our Gen Z audience’s voracious content appetite to drive engagement, highlight La-Roche Posay’s dermatological expertise, and give well-rounded, trustworthy guidance. Instead of sifting through questionable online advice, users are learning about topics through content created with dermatologists and experts in areas like nutrition and sleep. And rather than competing with the popular online personalities, the library welcomes familiar faces like nutritionist Emily English or beauty creator Dani Nichols. In total, it features 65 videos from content creators and 150 articles from the La-Roche Posay team.
There are also more than 50 pieces of content from Calm, including mindfulness activities - a unique feature and partnership in the digital skincare space.
ustwo helped us set the standard for what building great mobile products looks like for us.
A build for the future
Spotscan+ Coach is supported by a bespoke Backend for Frontend (BFF) hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which allows us to tailor backend services for the app whilst promoting reuse from other APIs in the L’Oréal ecosystem, reducing development time and increasing consistency across the backend stack.
Looking to the future, the architecture reduces the friction of app store releases through enabling enforced updates and feature flags - app content can change without downloading a new version from the app store, so it’s easier to add more to the experience. The architecture has been carefully considered to optimise for growth and change of the mobile app, supporting future needs.
We’ve built the app in React Native, with significant code reuse across iOS and Android versions, which also makes it quicker and more efficient to open up the experience to Android users – a high-priority feedback item from beta users.
As La Roche-Posay is the first L’Oréal brand to have this type of digital mobile experience, building a flexible framework that taps into L’Oréal’s overall ecosystem simplifies scaling the product as the company builds out its coaching vertical.
“We’ve loved partnering with ustwo on Spotscan+ Coach. This project has trailblazed new ways of working on building loved tech products. They have expertly navigated us towards an efficient product operating model in a complex organisation.
They are problem-solvers, skilled at simplifying technical complexities (architecture, automation, reliability, etc.) even when presenting to a large audience of senior business stakeholders. This ability significantly streamlines strategic business decision-making, taking technology into full account.”
Ultimately, while some apps measure success based on the time a user spends engaging with it, the success of Spotscan+ Coach is improving users’ everyday lives outside of the app - taking care of their skin and feeling good in it - which is what an impactful digital experience should do.