Every year people spend an average of 171 hours shopping for clothes, footwear and accessories. That adds up to more than a week every year. Research shows most people don’t like shopping. One week seems too much to spend on something we don’t enjoy.
As my final project on Ironhack Berlin I’ve designed the app that helps us to find specific clothes faster and can make shopping experience more efficient and satisfying.
RESEARCH
As a first step, I sent out the survey and interviewed group of people to find out more about the way how people buy clothes. I gathered all my insights in an affinity diagram that gave me better overview of this problem.
User Journey
I also mapped the user journey that helped me to understand better user’s frustration and find problems that I can solve to improve the whole shopping experience, make it less time-consuming and more satisfying.
Insights
Interviews helped me also to understand what most people, who don’t enjoy shopping, have in common.
“I hate shopping, but I like to buy clothes”
Most people like to buy new clothes, but shopping experience is something that prevents them from going to the stores or make this journey frustrating.
But still almost 80% apparel purchases are in traditional stores.
Why do we buy clothes in the store?
- to see the exact colour and texture, touch the material
- to try it on and be sure about the size
- to avoid returns
…and why do we shop clothes online?
- the overview is better — easier to find what needed
- it’s faster (but in fact we spend more time on buying online)
After grouping and analyzing information from the research I translated the different problems into possible design opportunities. I chose three main How Might We that I wanted to focus on.
IDEATION
My goal was to design the app that will help people buying clothes by showing available product in specific location. That makes shopping experience more satisfying — we find exactly what we want, faster — we know where to go, environment-friendly — we return less.
The next step was brainstorming ideas. I did some exercises to stimulate my creativity — Crazy 8’s, where I had to come up with 8 different ideas in 8 minutes and ‘Worst Idea’, where I came up with terrible, stupid, illegal solutions that then I tried to turn into a good ideas.
MoSCoW method - Feature prioritisation
After having a variety of different ideas I used MoSCoW technique to manage priorities of the complex concept and decide which features are a must in the app and which of them are not necessary at this point.
PROTOTYPE
Lo-Fi and Mid-Fi prototyping
I started organising the features by defining the main user flow and drawing the screens on paper. I also analyzed apps referring to my function — apps that use maps (Google Maps, Uber, Grab etc.) and e-commerce (Zalando, Zara, Asos etc.), to see how I can improve UX with familiar interactions and micro-interactions.
Before I started working on visual design, I tested the lo-fi prototype and made some important changes. I continued with the mid-fi prototype that helped me to test user flow and showed how important are even small interactions.
HI-FI PROTOTYPE
Brand attributes and visual design
I called this app sniff.
My goal was to create the app, that guide us on the street or in the shopping mall. It shouldn’t be distracting and entertaining. I wanted to make this brand trustworthy, reliable, effective, but never adventurous and exclusive.
Below my final prototype that I created using Sketch, Principle and Photoshop.
