Product design question
What approach will you take to create buying guides for cosmetics products on a Loreal mobile app?
- L'Oréal
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Content and product design for guiding purchase decisions in a category needing high personalization, shade and skin match.
How to approach it
- Clarify the user problem: cosmetics buying is highly personal, shade, skin type, concerns, and overwhelming online without trying products.
- Identify the core barrier: shade and product match uncertainty, which drives returns and cart abandonment.
- Prioritize a guided diagnostic quiz on skin type, tone, and concerns that maps to specific product recommendations.
- Layer in AR or virtual try-on if feasible, since L'Oreal already invests in this via ModiFace, as a secondary trust builder.
- Add social proof: reviews filtered by similar skin tone or type, more relevant than generic star ratings.
- Define success as quiz completion rate and its downstream effect on conversion and return rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Names the real, specific barrier to cosmetics e-commerce, shade and fit uncertainty, rather than generic 'buying guide' content.
- References L'Oreal's actual ModiFace AR capability as a grounded, feasible lever.
- Proposes a measurable causal link: quiz users should show lower return rates, a metric L'Oreal would actually care about.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic blog-style buying guides with no personalization, missing the core user problem.
- Not tying the feature to a business metric like return rate.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle users who skip the quiz?
- How would you measure if the guide actually reduced returns?
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More questions from L'Oréal
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop