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How might we encourage users to utilize their existing closets in a more sustainable way?
Fashion is one of the most polluting industries.
Fashion is the third most polluting industry and environmental concerns are constantly overlooked for the sake of profit. Fast fashion encourages consumers to constantly buy more and more clothes to keep up with quickly changing trends then discard them after a few wears.
“How might we encourage users to make more use of their existing closets?”
Upon conducting market research about fashion and sustainability, we found that most of the existing resources had to do with encouraging consumers to buy more new clothes from sustainable fashion brands.
Instead of encouraging users to continually buy more new clothes, we based our app’s concept around the idea ‘The most sustainable item of clothing is the one already in your closet’.
With our idea of an app that promoted sustainability and the better utilization of one’s closet, we conducted foundational research through 6 live interviews and an online survey with 34 respondents.
Through our research, we were able to refine our app concept. While initially we had thought about having a heavy focus on sustainability, our research showed us that while many of our users cited being interested in sustainability, they continued to shop at fast fashion brands for reasons such as price and diversity of styles. On the other hand, the majority of our users felt that they did not utilize their closets enough and were interested in knowing the contents of their closets.
Hence, by focusing on giving users information about the items already in their closets we could enable users to utilize their closets better and by doing so also help them take the first step towards sustainability.
From our research, we identified 2 main target groups and created user archetypes for them:
Based on our user archetypes and research insights, we ideated features that would be useful to our target user groups.
To quickly ideate what features potential screens would include, we drew paper screens so we could explore different paths without investing too much time in the visuals and layout.
Once we had low-fidelity wireframes of our concepts, we presented them to several users to gage their feedback. At this stage we realized that the feature users wanted the most was an outfit generation feature. While users were intrigued by the features such as wear statistics which would show them which items of clothing they were utilizing or not utilizing, the outfit generation feature would be the most actionable for them, as it would enable them to get new looks out of old clothes.
With our insights from user testing in mind, we iterated our designs to arrive at our final high-fidelity prototype. At this point, we also applied our branding. For our brand colors, we chose slightly muted colors to convey a natural and eco-friendly vibe, but also made sure to keep the colors vibrant enough so the app felt energetic. Our logo combines a tree and a price tag and is a nod to the true price of fashion.
There is a lot of food waste while simultaneously, a lot of people suffer from food insecurity.
How might we make it easier for rescuers to volunteer with Rescuing Leftover Cuisine?
Rescuing Leftover Cuisine (RLC) is a nonprofit food recovery organization. Their mission is to prevent excess food from going to waste by feeding people instead of landfills. They achieve this by engaging volunteer rescuers to deliver surplus food from donor partners (businesses) and deliver it to recipient human service agency partners (HSAs). Rescuing Leftover Cuisine wanted to increase volunteer rescuer engagement by improving their web app experience for volunteers and came to Blink (a UX Design and Research Consultancy) for a UX solution.
RLC had a system of a web-app, email and texts, that comprised the digital experience for their volunteers. Through presenting our research and design audit findings through a workshop with a client, we decided to focus on the core rescuer experience. We wanted to make it easier for rescuers to 1) browse for rescues, 2) view rescue details 3) sign up for rescues and 4) access relevant information about the rescues on-the-go.
To help with imagining how volunteers would want to interact with the parts of the web app we were redesigning, we created proto-personas to cover some of the characteristics displayed by our users. By doing so we wanted to be inclusive of the different patterns of some of our users we discovered through foundational research, such as sign up behavior and branch by branch differences.
After considering different scenarios our users might encounter, we designed an event calendar, with a split screen design with available rescues on the left and a calendar on the right. We also designed for two main ways of interacting with the calendar.
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We designed a filter panel, which would allow users to specify criteria such as location, distance and day & time to find the rescue most convenient for them.
To allow for more general browsing and browsing with a specific date in mind, we also utilized the calendar month view, where users would be able to see all events in the month/ or a specific date in the event list.
Once we had low-fidelity wireframes of our designs, we conducted user research with 11 RLC volunteers, across 5 different states.
With insights from user research sessions, a design charette with designers at Blink, and discussions with our client, we made changes until we arrived at our final designs.
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How might we use crowdsourced data to build better bike routes?
Currently I am only able to share limited information about this project, but in the meantime, if you want to learn more, the app is available for download on Apple app store and Google play store.
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I learnt just how important it was to test with users as through research sessions I discovered that some things that were obvious to me as the designer, were not intuitive for them at all. I also realized it is valuable to continue to iterate designs based on user feedback and critiques. More of my takeaways from this project and my internship at Blink UX can be read here.
Through this project, I learned about the importance of design strategy. Deciding on what message our product was to convey and how we hoped our users would benefit from it helped us define the features we needed in our product. In the future, I would further the message of sustainability by having a better process of cleaning out the wardrobe. To align with our brand’s vision, we would want clothes that are not utilized to go to new homes or be recycled whenever possible and one way we could do this is through partnering with recycling centers and thrift shops etc.
