Shesha

Inspiration

Shesha (mirror-glass in Hindi) blossomed from the seemingly mundane day-to-day interactions that left us with smiles on our faces. From trading lip glosses and comparing our beauty regimens, we found excitement in the products that we now share and bond over. We wanted to encompass that warm feeling of sharing experiences with similar complexions and struggles in the beauty community. As South Asian creators, we found it important to be able to sort and find products based on our physical characteristics that may go unseen in the commercial market. These features we once used to hide, we now wear with pride and find joy in sharing with our community. In further implementation, we hope to host sponsors from the BIPOC beauty community and connect their products directly to their minority audiences. Beauty can be a hard topic at times, but with Shesha, we hope to shine light on how beauty can bring people together and foster community - whether in front of a mirror or an online platform.

What it does

Shesha encompasses a few different features to help build both a thorough personal profile, as well as a wide network of beauty profiles to connect with. Its main focus is its feed in which your community (the people you follow) is filtered with your own beauty concerns. This aspect is gauged with an introductory quiz that helps you gain experience with the parameters that Shesha uses to sort beauty products. Once your profile is preliminarily built through the quiz, you can add/display products you use and interact with others. Through your personalized feed, you can bookmark products you want to revisit, visit new profiles you find similar to you, and see reviews based on your concerns. Outside of this, Shesha includes an explore page of Shesha’s entire community. The posts you see will be catered to what you interacted with most recently. Much of finding new products that work for you is left to social media that isn't designed with this intent. To alleviate the stress of gambling when buying new beauty products, Shesha concentrates consumer culture around real, honest feedback backed by personalization and people within your community.

How we built it

We began by listing every feature we'd ever want in an app dealing with health and beauty. Reflecting on our current community-based apps and how we would change them, we started with which tools we make the most use of. As we started to flesh out how to structure Shesha, we started with basic flows that we would focus on: a feed, a profile, an explore page. We then continued to build it out based on helpful functionality, and iterated on it to make it more user-friendly.

Challenges we ran into

Many of the obstacles we faced in the creation of Shesha came from sharpening our broad and vague ideas into an app that puts action to these ideas. Focusing on feasibility meant narrowing down many of our dream features. Finding the extent and depth of implementation was also a challenge, which meant really understanding the components we needed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Coming up with an original idea like Shesha, fully ideating on it, and bringing it to life in itself is something we are proud of. In addition, we taught ourselves and each other Figma. This fully acquainted us with the design process. In this time crunch, creating an efficient design flow that encompasses our vision while still being practical was a feat.

What we learned

The biggest thing we learned as a group is balance. We're friends who have never worked on a project together, so learning how to be intentional with our time and navigate the dynamics of ideation/building was a new experience. From narrowing down big ideas for our app to teaching and learning within the team, we embraced adaptability and honed our project scope management skills. This experience not only resulted in a successful project but also strengthened our collaborative abilities and individual growth.

What's next for Shesha

Looking into the future, Shesha aims to significantly enhance user experience and broaden its impact within the beauty community through a series of innovative features. Our upcoming developments include:

• the implementation of a facial scanning feature for personalized beauty recommendations
• the introduction of video reviews to encourage authentic content
• the streamlining of product additions through direct scanning We plan to curate databases to encompass a diverse range of beauty products and integrate external APIs for enhanced connectivity. Shesha will also introduce an e-commerce aspect, allowing users to conveniently purchase recommended products directly within the app. It would showcase curated collections and sponsorships within the BIPOC beauty community.

Built With

• figma