Client
Philip Morris Int.
Year
2023
Reach
1M+ users
Industry
Tobacco & retail tech
The product
IQOS is Philip Morris International's heated tobacco device, sold to adult smokers as an alternative to cigarettes. Around it sits a digital ecosystem: a website that has to explain the product before it can sell it, and a companion app people then use for years afterwards.
I worked across both as part of the UX/UI team, on the app, a desktop widget, and the responsive website. Wireframes, new screens, complete flows built from the ground up, and regular accessibility and QA passes on what we shipped.
The constraints
The site is run globally by PMI, so local markets had almost no room to publish anything of their own. Anything new had to give a market its own voice without breaking the global system around it.
It's a regulated category, so what the product is allowed to say changes from market to market. The same screens carry different copy depending on where they open.
And the app can only be as good as what the hardware tells it. Battery, usage, and fault detection all come from the device, so the design has to stay useful when the data is thin.
The work
Someone learns what the device is, decides to switch, buys it, then owns it for years. The website carries the first part, the app carries the rest, and both were being improved at the same time.
On the website the job was removing friction from a decision people had already made. In the app it was the relationship after the purchase. Four parts are worth showing properly.
Purchase Journey
The route from browsing to paying was longer than it needed to be, and the biggest drop-off came at account creation and billing. People decided to buy, then gave up on the paperwork. Signup came down to two steps, asking only for what an order actually needs.
The rest got shorter too. A slider at the top to move between categories, a reorder section for the consumables people buy again and again, and a product page with the colour choice and add to bag pinned to the bottom, so the decision and the action sit in the same place.
The configurator
People personalise a device they carry every day, so buying one became a build rather than a pick. Device, colour, door, cap, in that order, with a skip at every accessory step so someone who just wants the standard model goes straight through.
It solves a business problem quietly too. Accessories are hard to sell after the fact and easy to sell as part of the purchase. The skips are what make that work, because the longer route never gets in the way of the short one.
Device control
The device has almost no buttons, so the app is where you operate it. Rename it, set how brightly it glows and how it vibrates, run an auto clean, push a firmware update.
Diagnostics sit alongside. A check runs and ends on one of three answers: physical damage, a firmware update, or a problem that needs an IQOS expert. Always somewhere you can act, rather than a generic error and a support number.
Auto delivery
Tobacco sticks run out on a schedule, and reordering the same thing every few weeks is the kind of task people quietly abandon. Auto delivery turns it into a standing order so it stops being a task at all.
It also learns. Over time the app builds a picture of what someone actually orders and how often, so the schedule and the suggestions move closer to the real pattern rather than sitting on a default.
