a platform for eco-friendly, next-gen shopping. Fashionwise puts power back into the consumer's hands for selecting quality, long-lasting clothes that encourages users to save money over time; all while protect the environment.
'Fast fashion' is a business model that allows mass production of clothes. Products are designed, manufactured, shipped and put on store shelves for customers within just two weeks.
The fashion industry is a huge $2.5 USD trillion global industry. 150 billion garments are produced per year equating to about 20 items per person; but here's the real kicker — 30% of these garments are never sold.
Our aim is to create a solution from the viewpoint of consumers that combats the wastefulness generated by the fashion industry.
Our team collaborated on a questionnaire survey aimed towards the general public to gauge a broad understanding of their fashion buying habits, fast fashion opinions and knowledge of fast fashion. From this, we were able to gather a broad outlook on the current consumer habits of buying and spending.
Our team also conducted interviews with retail associates and workers anonymously to understand the selling techniques. We decided to leave out company and interviewee names for privacy concerns.
“There is a sense that it’s a marketing scheme, especially since all the competitors have begun to make pacts and pledges at very similar times. If you haven’t made a pledge you are behind.”
Our team went to various retail stores to map out the flow of shopper movements, and pay attention to what areas they were most engaged in. Customers were mainly concentrated around the sales sections. The new styles in these stores received very little attention, since most people went straight for the sales. We tried Zara, H&M, and Glassons which is displayed below.
After much deliberation and suggestions from peers, we attempted to combine the app and the plugin to create an online platform that can be used universally in-store and online. We created wireflows for both Desktop and Mobile.
However, after our first round of user testing, we quickly discovered that this isn't working.
Our team decided a focused and intuitive solution matters more than a feature-filled platform. We decided we wanted to expand the potential of the app, but how?
Below are some concept sketches we came up with, we looked over each other's designs and critiqued what worked, what didn't, and how we can evolve our product.
Deciding a scale for rating sustainability proved challenging. We didn't want to overload the user with statistics they might not even care or look at, but how can we make them care?
We decided to use the reframing technique and came across the idea of the five-star health rating. We've all seen it, we know how it works, it's rating how healthy your food is.
It's now intrinsic to the average shopper at the supermarket to glance over the health star rating, sometimes we don't even realise the split-second micro-decision that just occurs when you're about to buy a product. Shoppers care without even realising.
We found our reason for shoppers to care.
Overall, we did four rounds of user testing. Our platform evolved many times over during this iterative process, and below are some screenshots into the development of example screens.
Scanned Product Page
From the think aloud protocol, we understood that users were getting confused with the star rating system, thinking that is was a user rating and not a sustainability rating.
They were also unclear about the difference between the sustainability and quality bars. From this, we decided to use a sustainability and a durability bar to reduce the cognitive load on the user.
Furthermore, users stated that they wanted a button that would be able to save the clothing item as ‘purchased’ so they can keep track of what they have bought.
The Personal, Sleek Dashboard
Many users stated that they wanted a more personal connection to the platform, as well as a bigger link to sustainable fashion. They wanted somewhere they could track their progress of sustainable buying. Intro Dashboard!
Using co-design strategies, we created a dashboard screen where users are able to keep track of the clothes they bought, and rating of each item. These scores are added up to create an average score that is presented on the dashboard as a personal score. This score will motivate the user to buy more sustainable clothes with higher scores so boost their personal score.
Checking Out your liked items!
The ‘liked items’ page was well received as it allowed users to compare items that they have liked previously.
From the think aloud method, many users stated that both these pages looked too similar and couldn’t distinguish each page. This violated the heuristic consistency and standards, as although the pages were consistent with each other, they were too similar looking.
By changing the layout of the designs to look different, yet show consistency users should be able to easily distinguish them from each other. We decided on the ‘liked page to have 2 vertical columns whereas the ‘similar item’ page has 1 column.
