Tata CLiQ Palette

India's beauty market is crowded, and most digital beauty products sell the same way: a catalogue, a search bar, a few reviews. Social apps inspire but don't sell. Stores sell but don't inspire.

Tata CLiQ wanted both in one product, with personalisation at its core. The client's requirements arrived as more than 210 user stories, spanning feed, posting, groups, bag and checkout, and account, and had to fit what the existing commerce platform could support, all while a brand was being built around the idea of "Your Beautiful Obsession".

The question was not how to design every story. It was where social and commerce should meet, and how to keep each from getting in the other's way.

Before any screens, discovery covered numerous interviews with people from the target audience, benchmarking of the best personalisation, community and gamification in the market, and a review of the brand audit the client had shared.

People wanted a brand that knew them beyond skin type, recommendations they could trust in a market flooded with products, and a quick, painless path from reading to buying. That shaped a product vision with three directions: in-depth data capture, community, and repeatable engagement. Discovery also surfaced four engagement tactics that were not in the original requirements: gamified progress, live and short-form video, and progress tracking.

The brief came as a long list, not a structure. The first job was to work through every one of the 210+ user stories, separate what any store needs from what would make this product different, and find the journeys the whole product depended on.

Those became the red routes, the paths that had to work first time for the product to succeed. The information architecture was built around them, then tested as wireframes before any visual design was committed.

I planned and ran the first round of remotely moderated usability testing in March 2021, on early wireframes, with 13 tasks across shopping, social and account features, and wrote up the results.

The average task completion rate was 87.96% (95.38% counting pure completion), above the 80% success threshold used in this kind of testing. The three lowest-scoring tasks produced specific changes: "Forum" became "Groups", "Saved" became "Saved posts" with a clearer route to the wishlist, and private and public groups were made visually distinct. Smaller details were fixed too, such as moving the image counter away from the "Next" button in the posting flow.

The social layer is built to support the business as well as the audience. Feed, stories and posts give people inspiration from brands, experts and each other. Groups and a message board give beauty enthusiasts a place to talk through common needs, and give brands a platform to reach a new audience.

Anyone can post, and posting is designed to connect content with commerce. Creators tag products straight from the catalogue, add an emoji reaction to show how they felt about it, tag people from their network, and place tags directly on the photo. When someone views the post, the tagged products appear alongside it with prices and ratings, one tap from the shop.

This kept sharing simple for creators and gave brands a way to appear in the places people already look for ideas.

Checkout was designed around reducing friction and surfacing value. Delivery estimates come first, based on the customer's pincode. Quantity controls are simple: a visible trash icon at quantity 1, which tested at 100% task success, and a minus above that. The checkout button stays at the bottom as users scroll, and savings and free-gift thresholds are shown in the bag, with coupons validated in place.

Clear states cover the awkward moments too, like items that don't ship to a chosen address, gift wrap with a personal message, and low-stock warnings.

Tata CLiQ Palette was always meant to live beyond the screen. Alongside the retail team's work, I looked at how the app should connect to in-store experiences, and how a customer's profile, wishlist and saved looks could travel between the two. The store design itself was handled separately.

This project asked for both. It sat between a business wanting a differentiated beauty destination, a brand being created in parallel, and a platform with real technical limits, so it needed someone to connect those layers.

I led the whole UX journey and did much of it myself: working through 210+ user stories, mapping red routes, defining the information architecture, wireframing, planning and running usability testing, and designing the UI and the system behind it. The aim throughout was to make personalisation feel like help, not paperwork.