Overview
Fast Fashion is a growing trend with serious consequences for both the environment and consumers. This movement focuses on rapidly producing high volumes of clothing using cheap (and environmentally toxic!) materials to bring consumers inexpensive clothing.
Enter WornWell, an app designed to promote sustainable fashion by providing a platform to share clothing and style ideas in a way that encourages users to ditch fast fashion and re-wear their clothes.
Project Details
My Role
Research, UX, Visual
Time
2 Weeks
Team
3 Product Designers
The Problem
Micro-trends have emerged, where a style is “in” one moment, and “out” the next, leading to massive overconsumption and waste.
Design Challenge
Create a digital tool that will motivate individuals to become good environmental stewards through promoting awareness, building emotional connection, and atransforming thoughts into action.
User Interviews
We interviewed 10 people from various backgrounds to better understand how fast fashion impacts their lives. Our goals were to understand user’s:
Current fashion habits
Major Concerns
Barriers to action
Top Takeaways:
Social media creates enormous pressure to fit in with the trends
Sustainable fashion is expensive
It’s hard to know what to wear
People feel too small to make a difference
User Personas
We created user personas and journey maps to hone in on our audience and develop empathy. Teen and college-aged females, around ages 16–24, are the most impacted by and concerned about fast fashion. Using everything we learned in our interviews, we created the following user personas to keep in mind as we began to brainstorm our solution space.
Brainstorm
We were now ready to brainstorm ideas before checking back in with users in follow-up interviews. And boy, did we brainstorm. The sky was the limit! Some of our favorite ideas included:
An app that monitors your purchases and clothing use to give you insight into your personal impact.
An app that facilitates the sharing of clothes to minimize the need for consumers to constantly buy new clothing.
An app where users can build a virtual closet by uploading pictures of their items, and getting outfit suggestions based on what they have.
User Testing Results
We brought these ideas to another round of interviews to hear initial thoughts and define user priorities. We had thought our ideas were amazinggg (and users generally agreed), but we got some valuable, honest feedback that helped us better understand our users.
At the same time…
People don’t want to have to log their whole closet.
People want to see fashion in action
A social aspect is more meaningful
What they liked…
The ability to swap
Getting fashion inspiration
Seeing that they are making a difference
Add Some Sparkle!
We were now confident our functionality aligned with user goals, and we were ready to envision the solution in real life. We wanted our app design to match the users and the goal so we created a moodboard and style guide that was trendy and cool with catchy features like bright graphics and fun colors.
Prototyping
Next up was user testing. We tested a total of 9 different users, all females aged 18–24. Our goal was to get feedback on the user flow, hear what worked and what didn’t work, and understand how we could better meet our users’ needs. We found several key insights:
Uploading an Outfit
Pain point:
“I would say to just make it more easy when uploading outfits to not have to start from the beginning when you miss one thing or make it easy to go back to the previous screen where you could tag the clothing items”
Solution:
We realized we needed to account for user error. We created a pop-up so that when a user hit “Add to closet”, it would inform them they were about to leave the page, and give them the option to continue tagging if they still had items left they wished to tag.
The Dashboard
Pain point:
“I love the stats so if I could interract with them and see more on a dedicated home page, that’d be fun”
Solution:
Users thought it was so cool to see how they were making a difference. We added some more stats as pop-ups, and gave them the option to click to some extra links for educational resources to learn how they could reduce their fashion footprint.
Swapping
Pain point:
A couple of users commented that they would like to see some kind of metric so they would know the swapper was reliable and that their clothing would be turned back in good condition.
Solution:
We created the ability to leave a review so a user can rate their experience and if their clothing was returned properly. This will translate to a star-based rating system, so users can check others’ rating before deciding to initiate or allow for a swap.
Final Iteration
We took our user feedback to heart, revising some screens and creating new ones until we arrived at…WornWell. This final iteration addresses our main goals of creating a platform to minimize clothing waste, encourage personal accountability and awareness, provide a communal aspect, and promote personal style confidence.
Reflection
We created our app with the goal of creating a fun, interactive way to get users excited about rewearing their clothing and ditching fast fashion.
It was exciting to see our ideas evolve through multiple rounds of interviews and user testing, and we were happy to receive such positive feedback. All of our feedback helped us better meet our users needs. Our favorite user quote was “The only thing I wish was that this was on the app store!”
Next Steps
While it’s really great to hear how much users enjoyed our app, we realize that there is always room for improvement.
In future iterations, we would need to further prototype the app to enable users to make more extensive use of the filtering features and viewing more outfits on their discover page. We could also play around with different sorts of incentives to keep our users coming back each day.