Designing for high-end fashionistas

The Problem

Fashion is the #2 most polluting industry in the world. Consumer waste in fashion increases year over year.

The Solution

Reduce the amount of clothes that end up in our landfills through a platform that enables customers to subscribe to high-end and sustainable fashion items they care about.

My Role

During 4 weeks, I teamed up with a balanced team of 1 project strategist, 2 devs, and 1 product owner. Here are some of the big tasks I completed:

• Information Architecture
• Information Design
• User Interviews
• Usability testings
• Rapid Prototyping
• Branding
• Competitive analysis
• Front-End Development

Execution: Prototyping

My main goal in this first week was to create a paper prototype and to do a round of usability testing in Guerilla Mode! Lucky I was, I tested the prototype on site since few of my coworkers matched with our female fashion millenial persona. One recurring user insight was the confusion between clothing subscription vs direct buy. “How much is this jacket?” “Can I keep those pants?”. To resolve this issue, copy had to be explicit, simple with no fashion jargon.

Brand Competitive Analysis / Mood Board

My second goal of the week was to translate the vision of the product owner into a brand identity that our fashionista persona would be attracted to.

• Part 1 – I engaged the conversation by comparing existing competitors to get the good and the ugly.
• Part 2 – Iterating on a moodboard until our persona come with the feelings we are trying to come with. (Feminine, Simple, and High-End)
• Part 3 – I created higher fidelity comps.

Interactive Prototype / Usability Testing

During the second week, I merged comps and paper prototype into an interactive prototype validated it through usability-tests. Since the main flow was validated previously with the paper prototype, I cared more about user interaction pain points such as browsing and filtering garments. I wanted to create an elegant and fast way to navigate between garments and sizes. So I came with that fat filter navigation at the top of the app avoiding back and forth frictions between pages.

HTML/CSS Implementation

The following 2 sprint weeks were focused on the development of the web app. I developed the Frontend for mobile first and then designed up directly in the browser for tablet and desktop. This process saved us time and efforts.

Takeaways

This project was super motivating for me to increase my work speed. The short amount of time pushed my limits. I was able to fail faster with usability test results and come back with new solutions. Having a taste for fashion facilitated the synbiose between me and the founder along the project.