Fash Forward

The Problem

Creating a native mobile app that makes sustainability information in the fashion industry more accessible for consumers.

User Interviews & Affinity Mapping

Here are some themes we found:

After screening 10+ participants to establish users who have a connection to sustainability in their own lives, we narrowed down to 4 users who we interviewed to get a better sense of what sustainability means to them and how that applies to their fashion purchase decisions. From our user interviews, we were able to gather data for an affinity map to identify our users common thoughts, feelings, and challenges with sustainable clothing purchases.

• I care about sustainability efforts and practice it in a variety of ways in my own life but find the higher cost of sustainable fashion products to be a potential barrier.
• I gather my information about companies sustainability efforts from a variety of sources.
• In general, I am willing to spend more if I know for certain the items I am purchasing are sustainable and higher quality.

Competitive & Comparative Analysis

In our initial research of competitors in the fashion industry who offer sustainability information to their users, we recognized that there wasn't an all encompassing app that would allow for users to not only gather the information, but also allow them to make a decision as to whether or not they would like to make purchases from a given company.

During our analysis process, we began to look at some comparative apps that offered location services to bridge the information component with the action component of making a purchase decision based on the information made available to users.

• Competitive Analysis: 6 fashion industry brands and applications to gather information about existing services established for users looking to make sustainable clothing purchases.
• Comparative Analysis: 2 food industry companies that would help glean insight on how to best bridge information with geographical relevant companies in the user's area.

Meet our target user: Juliana Perkins!

Problem Statement: Juliana is a dedicated personal trainer and cares deeply about the environment. She tries to shop for more eco-friendly clothing but finds that stores lack transparency in their sustainability efforts and wants more information about these efforts.

How Might We: How might we help make the sustainable clothes shopping experience more accessible for Juliana?

The Design Process

With a clear Problem Statement identified, and some background research on existing products conducted, we were ready to begin the design process. We ran a Design Studio session to get a sense of where our team was thinking common app pages would land in terms of their design including a Home page, Login page, and a Location specific page.

As a team, we moved into designing some mid-fidelity wireframes that we could put in front of users to determine the areas of our initial designs that could use more attention.
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We put our mid-fidelity prototypes in front of 3 users in a round of usability testing. While the usability testing yielded overall positive results from the tasks given to our participants, there were a few details we needed to re-examine. From the usability testing, it became clear that we had some distinct issues to address:

• On boarding needed a clearer expressed purpose for users to understand the need and intentions.
• Mapping navigation didn't meet users expectations that needed to be revisited on the design end.
• Some quality of life improvements mentioned around visibility within the filtering feature.

The Iteration Process

Based on feedback from usability testing, we focused on iterations of our map design as well as our onboarding screens to address feedback around our original design schemes including:

• A deeper onboarding process with more detail to the sustainability rating system the application utilizes
• A mapping experience more in line with what participants expected the mapping portion to look like
• UI changes throughout the application for readability and ease of use

Next Steps

If given more time on this project, there are a few pieces I would look to focus on building upon:

• Exploring additional potential user flows using alternative personas to flesh out application more
• Exploring additional features that can be tested and iterated on
• Continued UI improvements to constantly be in alignment with user expectations and to create a seamless user experience