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Ulta Beauty Achieved

Increased usability and decreased UX friction

Increased marketing effectiveness

Accelerated overall conversion and reduced time to insights

Overview

Insights from the Ulta Beauty Connection community help to scale UX research and drive brand strategy, ensuring every business decision has consumers in mind.

Leveraging multiple quantitative and qualitative methods, the Ulta research team conducts concept and usability testing to refine digital experiences and validate user preferences. Insights reach over 200 stakeholders throughout the business guiding leadership decisions, strengthening product and technology roadmaps, and assisting UX, merchandising and marketing teams to develop effective GTM strategies. 

This dedication to understand, refine, and strengthen the entire buyer journey ensures guest-centered decision making and keeps Ulta at the forefront of innovation. 

Program Goals:

  • Integrate guest feedback into the agile product development process to enhance usability and accessibility
  • Ensure every feature solves real guest problems and meets expectations
  • Drive conversions by tying research insights directly to measurable business outcomes

Business Opportunity 

Ulta Beauty recognized that there was a critical need to amplify the voice of their guests and integrate that feedback directly into their product development cycle. By doing so it would allow them to harness guest-centered insights to drive informed design and strategic decisions. However, a significant challenge laid in scaling their UX research capabilities to keep pace with a rapidly growing, agile-driven organization.

The objective was clear to the team: by successfully integrating guest feedback seamlessly into their process, they could ensure every feature that was released truly solved real guest problems, meet higher usability and accessibility standards, and ultimately drive higher conversions.

ulta beauty bar


Solution

The Ulta team deployed a robust, multi-modal research ecosystem centered around the Ulta Beauty Connection community. Community members provide a direct, line to guests, enabling the team to quickly run relationship and brand surveys, ad hoc studies, targeted concept testing, and true product co-creation initiatives to proactively track evolving guest needs.

To achieve a complete, 360-degree view, the Insights team deploys a wide variety of activities also including:

  • Transactional surveys and NPS for immediate feedback right after key digital interactions
  • Deep-dive qualitative approaches like focus groups, in-depth interviews, and diary studies
  • Usability and prototype testing to refine digital experiences before launch
  • A/B testing and digital analytics for large-scale validation


The data is then fully accessible, becoming readily available to 200 associates across the organization. This allows the insights to be shared widely, fostering partnerships with executive leadership, Product, Technology, UX/Design Systems, Merchandising, and Marketing teams. Through this collaborative approach, Ulta Beauty can successfully embed genuine guest empathy into every layer of decision-making.


Results

The integration of insights has yielded substantial and measurable results across the business. Consumer insights now directly and proactively shape how Ulta Beauty designs and delivers digital experiences, informing new product concepts, guiding marketing and campaign messaging, and successfully refining the buying journey to reduce friction. 

The team ensures impact is felt company-wide:

  • Strategic guidance: findings are shared with executive leadership to guide strategic decision-making and set priorities
  • Product and technology impact: informing roadmaps, prioritizing features, and shaping both the app and web experiences
  • Design and experience refinement: collaboration with UX and Design System teams to ensure optimal usability, accessibility, and consistency
  • Marketing effectiveness: aligning Merchandising and Marketing on content strategy, brand storytelling, and promotional effectiveness

The Ulta Beauty research team is constantly showcasing how their insights facilitate change across the business. Product teams are seeing improved usability and accelerated development timelines. Marketing is able to translate guest feedback and shape creative direction and messaging, leading to stronger engagement, higher campaign effectiveness, and increased brand awareness. 

By consistently connecting guest-centric research directly to product adoption, campaign engagement, and development speed, the team firmly establishes insights as a critical, quantifiable impact on Ulta’s overall success.

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