5 UX Lessons from Ulta Beauty

Ulta Beauty rewrote the rules of retail to become America's largest beauty chain with a loyalty program of 40 million members. They've built a digital experience that not only mirrors their in-store journey but often surpasses it.

When our partners at Nosto let us know that Ulta was the subject of their latest retail masterclass series, we jumped at the chance to dig into their UX and product discovery strategy.

The session was packed with insights on where Ulta shines and where there's room to grow. We peeled back the layers of their digital strategy, dissecting everything from how they nail product discovery and site navigation to their category merchandising and personalized UX. 

Prepare your site experience for the peak retail season with these 5 UX lessons from Ulta:

Lesson #1: Make your homepage work harder

Highlights

A warm welcome
The Ulta.com homepage effectively guides shoppers with clear category navigation. It immediately invites product discovery through a prominent "shop by category" section at the top and eye-catching promotional banners.

Many ways to shop
Ulta.com incorporates static product recommendation blocks like "deals for you," "new for you," and "we think you'll like," offering various starting points for shoppers.

Made for mobile
The use of mobile-first images ensures excellent scaling for all mobile devices, providing a seamless browse experience.

Opportunities 

Create custom recommendations
The layout is clean and intuitive, but feels static. Make recommendations more dynamic and personalized. For returning visitors, implement a "Pick up where you left off" feature to remind them of their journey. For first-time visitors, showcase best-sellers to guide their initial exploration.

Give customers a reason to act now
Add urgency cues like "Only 3 left" or "Last Chance" to product cards or promotional banners.

Optimize layout for key info
Don’t hide important promotions like “Today’s Deals” halfway down the page. Bring them front and center so it grabs attention right away.

Lesson #2: Polish your product listings and pages 

Highlights

Guided discovery
Clicking into a category like "lips" on Ulta.com presents options to further refine product types. Following this, a single recommendation block appears before the complete product listing. This design excels by curating the initial user experience, preventing an immediate overwhelming display of all products and allowing users to scroll for full exploration.

AI search optimization
FAQs placed near the bottom of a page significantly enhance product discovery across various search platforms. They contribute to:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Improving the page's ranking in traditional search engine results.
• AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Increasing the likelihood of the content appearing as direct answers in search results.
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Optimizing the page to be included in AI-generated summaries and citations on AI platforms.

Opportunities

Visual product variants:
Don't make users click away! Display color variants as swatches directly on product cards on PLPs.

Dynamic merchandising
Go beyond static product ordering. Merchandise recommendations based on business goals (e.g., highlighting high-margin items) or by reviews to build trust. Consider dynamic sorting based on seasonality, inventory, or user engagement to surface relevant results faster.

Enhanced product imagery
Implement a "second reveal" image on hover states for desktop users, allowing a quick preview of alternate angles or products in use.

Sticky filters
Make filters on PLPs sticky as users scroll down, allowing for quick refinements without having to scroll back to the top.

Favorite Icons
Introduce a "favorite" or "wishlist" icon at the grid level on PLPs, allowing users to easily save and compare products for later.

Lesson #3 Stay one step ahead with search

Highlights

Anticipate user intent
Before you begin typing, the search defaults to showing popular products, recently viewed, and trending. The interface dynamically updates when you begin typing, showing top results and suggested search items. This layered guidance helps shoppers feel like the site understands their intent, even before they finish typing.

Use your buyer’s language
On the backend, the search is also error-tolerant and recognizes synonyms, which is key in beauty where customers might search “SPF” instead of “sunscreen,” or “hydrating” instead of “moisturizing.”

Opportunities 

Color tagging 
In this example, we’ve searched for “red,” but the results don’t reflect the actual color. Instead, we see a brand with “Red” in the name, which isn’t what most users are expecting.

This is a common gap in beauty retail, where visual intent matters more than literal text. It’s also an opportunity: smarter color tagging or AI-based visual matching could surface products that truly reflect what the shopper meant.

Embrace adaptive search
Personalized product recommendations or adaptive results based on previous behavior are a major opportunity to level up. If this were a returning customer who always shops clean brands or leans toward lip products, the results should reflect that. It’s not just about relevance. It’s also about making search feel intelligent and responsive.

Lesson #4: Revamp your cart experience for intelligent upsells

Highlights

Mini cart, big impact
The mini cart lets shoppers make key decisions like shade selection without sending them back to the PDP. That’s a small but important friction reducer, especially in beauty where color is everything. We also see smart product recommendations right within the cart, each with a clear “Add to Bag” button. 

Driving loyalty and AOV 
The full cart experience does a nice job of setting expectations—delivery options, payment methods, and reward point callouts are all front and center. These are great cues to reassure shoppers and reinforce loyalty at a high-intent moment.

What stands out is the presence of product recommendations in the cart like ‘beauty under $20’ pushing low cost items is an easy win for driving higher average order value. 

Opportunities 

Leverage post-purchase upsells 
Don't let the "Thank You" page be a dead end. After checkout, shoppers are highly engaged, making it the perfect moment for targeted offers. Implementing intelligent post-purchase upsells (e.g., lower-cost items, travel sizes, samples) between the confirmation and thank you pages, driven by real-time behavior and affinity signals, can significantly uplift average order value.

Cart clarity
The mini cart currently lacks a quick view or preview of products. The discrepancy in item count between the mini cart and full bag (due to gifts not being clearly distinguished) can cause confusion. Clearly highlighting free gifts in a separate component in the cart would alleviate the confusion.

Lesson #5: Use personalization & A/B testing for continuous improvement

The overarching theme from Ulta's analysis is the immense potential of moving from static experiences to truly dynamic, personalized user journeys. 

AI is not going anywhere, and the key is to embrace it. There are continuously new apps with AI features that can revolutionize your UX. For instance, AI can drive more intelligent product recommendations (like Nosto's capabilities), inform dynamic merchandising, and even influence how your site's content is summarized by search engines and generative AI tools like Google Answers or ChatGPT. 

The goal is to provide the right content for customers, educate them, and always maintain your brand's authenticity even as you leverage these powerful tools.

Personalization examples

• Dynamic homepage content: Instead of a generic banner, show returning customers a "Welcome Back, [Name]! Here's What You Were Looking At" section, or highlight new arrivals based on their past purchase categories (e.g., "New Skincare Just for You").
• Intelligent product recs: Go beyond "Customers Also Bought." Use apps to suggest products based on a customer's specific skin type from a quiz, their shade preferences, products they've viewed but not purchased, or even items frequently bought together with what's already in their cart.
• Segmented pop-ups & offers: A returning customer who frequently buys a certain brand might see a pop-up offering a discount on a new product from that same brand, or an offer for free shipping if their cart is close to the threshold.
• Personalized search & filters: If a customer frequently searches for "clean beauty" or "vegan makeup," future search results or filter defaults could prioritize those categories.

A/B testing examples

• Homepage layouts: Test different arrangements of product carousels, featured collections, or promotional banners to see which drives more clicks to key pages.
• "Add to Cart" buttons: Experiment with button color, size, text ("Add to Bag," "Buy Now," "Get Yours!"), and placement on product pages.
• Product page information: A/B test the order of product images, descriptions, reviews, or ingredients lists to see what helps customers make faster decisions. For beauty, testing the prominence of shade selectors or "how to use" videos can be crucial.
• Checkout flow simplification: Test reducing the number of steps in the checkout process, or simplifying form fields, to minimize abandonment rates.
• Recommendation logic: Experiment with different algorithms for "customers also viewed" or "frequently bought together" to optimize upsell and cross-sell effectiveness.

Glow up your digital experience

Ulta Beauty has built a strong digital experience by focusing on product discovery, intuitive navigation, and strategic merchandising. While they excel in many areas, the webinar highlighted that the greatest opportunities lie in layering in smarter, personalized recommendations and committing to consistent A/B testing. The increasing role of AI in ecommerce makes these optimizations more powerful and achievable than ever.

For ecommerce teams in beauty, health, and wellness, these insights offer a clear roadmap. By recognizing user intent, reducing friction, and continuously optimizing your site, you can deliver an even more relevant, "customer-first" digital experience. Want to see how to apply these strategies to your brand? Consider exploring a demo with Nosto or connect with Third and Grove to sharpen your site experience for peak season and beyond.

Watch the webinar on-demand at the link below: 
→ Retail masterclass: Analyzing Ulta Beauty's UX and product discovery