led, Designed & Launched
Jijo Jacob (MBA)
About TataCLiQ
TataCLiQ Palette, a subsidiary of TataCLiQ, is a rapidly growing beauty and personal care platform in India with over 9.5 million active users. Built on the Tata Group’s legacy of trust and brand-building, Palette has positioned itself as a credible destination for authentic beauty products.
The platform features 1,000+ brands and is designed to deliver a personalized and seamless shopping experience. By combining curated product recommendations with a vibrant community of experts, creators, and enthusiasts, Palette helps users make informed choices and discover products that fit their individual routines and goals.
Whether catering to minimalist skincare users or those with a maximalist makeup approach, TataCLiQ Palette empowers people to explore, experiment, and express themselves through beauty with confidence.
Context & Problem
TataCLiQ Palette, an extension of the TataCLiQ ecosystem, set out to redefine the online beauty shopping experience in India. With an ambitious vision to establish itself as a trusted and leading destination, the platform needed to:
Understand the nuances of India’s rapidly evolving beauty market.
Build a user-centric e-commerce platform that balances trust, authenticity, and scale.
Support growth through user acquisition, retention, and long-term engagement strategies.
The challenge was not only to create a seamless and delightful shopping experience but also to establish a scalable design system that could evolve with the brand and business needs.
My Role
As Product Designer, I worked across the entire product lifecycle — from shaping the vision and visual direction, to building the design system, and scaling the platform for growth. I partnered closely with leadership, PMs, engineers, and external agencies to align design decisions with business goals.
My responsibilities included:
Establishing the design language and scalable design system.
Leading UX/UI for core shopping flows (Search, Feed, PLP, PDP, Cart, Checkout).
Driving data-informed design decisions via dashboards and research.
Mentoring junior designers and aligning with cross-functional teams.
Goals
The project evolved in three major phases, each with distinct goals:
Phase I – Market Fit & Foundation
Understand India’s beauty market and user expectations.
Establish a strong brand identity and intuitive platform design.
Phase II – Growth & Acquisition
Drive user acquisition and monthly order growth.
Scale the platform with a robust design system and innovative features across the shopping funnel.
Phase III – Retention & Engagement
Optimize customer lifetime value through retention-focused initiatives.
Use data-driven insights to enhance features and scale the design system for future growth.
Lean UX Process
I applied a Lean UX framework throughout the project, cycling through Build → Measure → Learn loops at every phase:
Hypothesize: Define assumptions around user needs, retention drivers, and business opportunities.
Build: Rapidly design and prototype features, aligning with tech feasibility.
Measure: Monitor dashboards (Omniture, Clevertap, Tableau) and conduct user testing/interviews.
Learn: Translate insights into roadmap adjustments, design system evolution, and future iterations.
This approach kept the product agile, data-driven, and user-centric.
Process & Iterations
Phase I — Market Fit & Foundation
Challenges
Entering a competitive beauty e-commerce market with global players.
Establishing trust and authenticity as key differentiators.
Process
Partnered with executive leadership to shape the new app vision.
Collaborated with engineering leaders to define workflows and standards, improving delivery velocity.
Established the design language and design system, ensuring scalable consistency.
Defined app roadmap and prioritized foundational features (Feed, PLP, PDP, Cart, Navigation).
Conducted competitor benchmarking, wireframing, usability testing, and UI design.
Impact
Delivered a cohesive first version of the platform, balancing brand identity and usability.
Built a scalable design foundation, enabling faster iteration in future phases.
Design done by L&F - Old
Phase II — Growth & Acquisition
Challenges
Rapidly growing user base demanded scalability.
Need to drive monthly order growth while differentiating from competition.
Process
Partnered with engineering managers to resolve tech bottlenecks and introduce innovative capabilities.
Worked with PMs to map quarterly strategic initiatives across all funnels.
Established a feature prioritization framework, categorizing features into Top Priority (Feed, Search, PDP, PLP, Cart), Strategic Opportunities (Navigation, Social), and Deprioritized items.
Evolved the design system to support rapid feature expansion.
Artifacts
Feature Prioritisation Matrix (balancing impact vs effort).
Roadmap Planning Sheets for cross-functional accountability.
Impact
Accelerated rollout of high-priority features that directly boosted acquisition.
Increased monthly active users and orders.
Reduced design-to-development handoff friction, improving delivery speed.
Feed
Video Series
Profile
PLP
PLP - Filters
Stories
Referral
Live Streaming
Video Chapterisation
Phase III — Retention & Engagement
Challenges
Growth alone was insufficient — retention and CLTV needed to improve.
Scaling the design system while ensuring data-driven design.
Process
Collaborated with PMs/engineering on sprint planning and roadmap adjustments based on live data.
Introduced analytical dashboards for the design team to track feature performance.
Established best practices for UX consistency and scalability.
Integrated user research metrics into the design workflow (behavior analysis, interviews, usability tests).
Impact
Improved retention rate and customer lifetime value.
Enhanced user engagement by refining high-value features based on live insights.
Created a sustainable design ecosystem that positioned TataCLiQ Palette for future growth.
Leveraging Analytics & Reporting
Monitoring the Existing Platform
Used Omniture dashboards to track platform performance, identify drop-off points, and uncover optimization opportunities.
Measuring Customer Lifetime Value & Retention
Applied Tableau dashboards to calculate and analyze CLTV and retention rates, establishing key baseline metrics for growth.
Understanding User Behaviour & Planning Research
Leveraged CleverTap to analyse behavioural patterns, which informed the design of user research studies and guided the prioritisation of feature improvements.
Every quarter I partner closely with product managers and engineering leadership to co-create the strategic roadmap. We run a tight, iterative planning cadence: define the quarter’s core objectives, translate those objectives into prioritized features and execution tasks, and anchor trade-offs to business metrics. This data-driven approach—combining qualitative research with dashboard insights—helps us reduce blockers, align cross-functional owners, and ensure TataCLiQ Palette continually evolves to meet user needs and long-term business goals.
Feature Prioritisation matrix
low Effort
high impact
low impact
Top Priority
Feed
Bottom
Navigation mobile
Video Series
Search
Feed Search Bar
Video
chapterisation
Desktop(PLP)
Social Tab
PLP
Magic Mirror
Cart
Desktop
Navigation
PDP
Desktop(PDP)
Strategic Opportunity
Forget it
Features after MVP
Feed
Social
PDP
Rating & Review
Search
Wishlist
App Inbox
Search
Beauty ID
Rating & Review
Shop Tab
PLP
My Impact on TataCLiQ Palette
72.73%
Improved Checkout to payment ratio
70.13%
Improved Payment to Order success
0.81%
Improved Conversion rate
99.81%
Improved Revenue
26%
Improved Unique Visitors
11%
Improved Visits
63%
Improved Login Success rate
26%
Improved Page Views / Visits
11.37%
Improved Visits/Visitors
8%
Improved PLP Viewed Per visits
12.78%
Improved PLP to PDP ratio
19.67%
Improved SERP(Search engine rank tracking) to PDP ratio
6.35%
Reduced Pincode Serviceability failure rate
9.94%
Reduced OOS(Out-of-Specification) Failure Rate
8.28%
Reduced Null Search
Percentage
47%
Improved PDP Viewed per visit
9.43%
Improved Add to Bag rate
5.33%
Improved Cart to Order Success
18.68%
Improved Checkout
Initiate ratio
55.86%
Improved Checkout to delivery Selection rate
Reflections & Learnings
Scalability matters early: Building a design system in Phase I saved significant time and complexity in later phases.
Lean UX is critical in fast markets: Short feedback loops (dashboards + user testing) kept the product aligned with evolving user needs.
Strategic prioritization drives outcomes: Using impact-effort frameworks ensured that we focused resources where they mattered most.
Design leadership is beyond pixels: Driving cross-functional collaboration, mentoring interns, and aligning roadmaps were as impactful as UI craft.
Final Thought
TataCLiQ Palette was more than just a beauty e-commerce app — it was an opportunity to build, scale, and evolve a design-driven platform in one of the fastest-growing consumer markets in the world. My role evolved alongside the platform: from shaping foundations, to accelerating growth, to ensuring long-term retention and scalability.
Thank you!
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