Glowbe App
2023-2024
See on app store
Glowbe is a personalized face yoga course designed to improve skin condition and facial contours. Launched in 2019, the app initially showed significant growth in both users and revenue. However, over time, its design and monetization strategies became outdated, prompting the team to plan a full update.
I joined the project as part of my work with Purple Studio, where my main task was to refresh the product’s core elements across platforms: from a new version of the app and updated web-to-app onboarding to a redesigned landing page and social media templates.
Current state
Before I began, I decided to look into why the app had lost its competitive advantage. I reviewed our current interface, including the onboarding process and how we keep users engaged. I also studied successful skincare apps to understand the strategies they use to retain users. This research helped me find the main areas that need improvement:
Personalization: Users value apps that adapt to their unique needs and offer tailored recommendations based on their personal data.
Motivation through progress: Features like daily tasks, streaks, and clear visual progress tracking help users build habits and stay engaged.
Clean style: simple design with soft accents that navigates the user without unnecessary distractions
App Redesign
With these ideas in mind, I began the redesign. To optimize development efforts, I retained the core UX flow, as we weren’t planning to introduce any new content. This allowed us to preserve some elements and focus on updating only the visual part. However, the Today screen required a complete overhaul to align with our goals. It became the centerpiece of the redesign, featuring more interactive elements and motivational mechanisms to better engage users and enhance their satisfaction with the app (and its subscription).
The Today screen introduced a system where users could track their routines through lists and mark them as completed. After all, we all love the feeling of ticking off our to-do lists, right? To further motivate users, a streak calendar was added. I also proposed rewarding users with bonus materials for their achievements, which seemed like an excellent way to boost engagement and satisfaction. Additionally, I incorporated the design for an AI chat feature (because, of course, you can’t go without it these days).
Updated web-to-app onboarding
I also updated the web-to-app onboarding, using all my successful frameworks (here you can read more about how it was created). Compared to the previous version, the new onboarding included many screens that helped us collect detailed information about the user’s skin condition. This allowed us to create a more accurate program and build greater trust with users.
In addition, I worked on updating the landing page design and created a set of templates for social media. These templates could potentially make the product more attractive and trustworthy for users.
And everything didn't go as planned
Since Glowbe belongs to Purple Studio, a startup focused on creating its own apps, and I was part of the team, we often worked on multiple projects at the same time. While working on Glowbe, our team also focused on another project. We aimed to create a universal structure for quickly building apps (primarily web apps, as they are implemented faster and easier), which would allow us to develop mini-apps for any high-tech direction and test hypotheses in different niches with minimal time and resources.
As part of the experiment, we thought, what if we combine the developments of our app constructor with the concept of Glowbe to see if it could work? And yes, it helped us define a block system that could now be used to assemble fully functional mini-apps and scale them to various niches. This foundation became a working tool for us, allowing faster and cheaper hypothesis testing in different niches, but that’s another story :) As a result, work on the full redesign of Glowbe took a back seat, the project was frozen, and the team shifted its focus to another product.
But we still have results
It’s always sad when your ambitious hypotheses and ideas don’t get the chance to move forward. At the same time, we discovered another extremely useful solution that later allowed the team to:
Test various product niches as quickly as possible
Have an app constructor ready to adapt to any niche
Reduce the costs of developing new products