Week 1 — Starting the MSc Project: Where This All Began

THE RAW THEORY

So, semester 3 is here and this is where everything we've been building toward actually comes together. This blog is going to document the full journey of my Master's project week by week the progress, the decisions, the dead ends, and hopefully the outcomes.

My project is called "Bridging the Experience Gap: Translating In-Store Retail Experiences into Online Environments" and it sits at the intersection of UX, Service Design, and cosmetic retail. The basic problem I'm exploring is this: when you walk into a store like Sephora or a beauty counter, you touch things, smell things, get advice, and build confidence in what you're buying. When you shop online, most of that just disappears. The question I'm trying to answer is can we design digital experiences that actually replicate that?

How I got here

This didn't come from a single lightbulb moment. I started quite broadly, reading around consumer behaviour in beauty retail, why online cosmetics shopping feels frustrating, and what makes physical stores feel different. The more I read, the more I kept coming back to the same idea the gap isn't really about information or product photos. It's about interaction and confidence. Digital platforms give you facts. Physical stores give you an experience. That realisation is what shaped this project.

From there I came across Pine and Gilmore's Experience Economy, which frames value as something that comes from memorable, engaging experiences rather than just products. That clicked immediately in the context of cosmetics. It also led me into skeuomorphic design the idea of using real-world metaphors in digital interfaces to make interactions feel more familiar and intuitive. That's now a central part of how I'm approaching the design side of this project.

What I've completed so far

Going into this semester, I've already done a significant amount of groundwork. The research proposal is fully written and has gone through several rounds of supervisor feedback. It includes a literature review, research statement, methodology overview, and a project plan across six phases: Research, Synthesis, Design, Prototyping, Testing, and Final Output.

I've also done contextual inquiry in physical retail environments basically observing people shopping for cosmetics in real stores, watching how instinctive and sensory the whole process is. I followed that up with semi-structured interviews with people who shop both in-store and online, and the conversations were genuinely illuminating. One thing someone said that really stuck with me was that online cosmetics shopping felt like "just guessing and hoping for the best." That's kind of the whole problem in one sentence.

On the design side, I've been developing The Raw Theory  my own digital platform concept which is where the skeuomorphic design thinking will be applied and tested.

What this semester looks like

The plan is to move through the remaining phases: finishing synthesis, developing the design system, building and testing a prototype, and producing a conference-level academic paper as the final output. There are also presentations in July and August, so the pressure is real but the structure is clear.

I'll be posting here every week with updates, evidence, and honest reflections on how it's going.