Shop stylish, responsibly sourced clothing without compromising your values.

Launched with the goal of connecting people to ethical, stylish clothing options, Eco-Stylist is looking to bring personalization to their marketplace and find ways to add value to their customers experience.

My design team’s task was to propose a completely re-designed, validated product that utilizes the fundamentals of UX, design thinking, usability and testing to produce a robust, clickable mid-fidelity web application.

My Design Team:

Richard N Sarmiento | Project Lead
Shanel Vicente | Research Lead
Mingming Wu | Interaction Lead

Project Timeline

Research Goals

Being that Eco-Stylist serves more as marketplace and not an e-commerce site the goals of our research surrounded around the idea of discovering how Eco-Stylist could generate consumer interest and confidence in using their services. We found it important to:

• Discover the means to which consumers draw inspiration for their choice of style.
• Decipher if there is a correlation between the consumer’s values, the consumer’s awareness of ethical & sustainable practices in clothing manufacturing, and the consumer’s purchasing decisions. We realize that sometimes people don’t necessarily make informed purchasing decisions, despite what they believe.
• Gain insight about the consumer’s shopping habits and priorities.

Discover

We kicked off our task by conducting a collaborative, rough LEMEr’s Assessment to brainstorm where we should start.

• The “Shop mens” tab in the navigation was misleading, because it implies that there is another catalog besides “mens”. Filters also exist to search for clothes by gender. We found the inconsistency of who truly is included in the target audience to be very dissatisfying.
• Users were re-directed to another website to make their purchases for each item. There was no notice or warning, so the user is initially deceived into thinking that they were shopping on the Eco-Stylist website. We found this to be very inefficient and inconvenient for the user.
• There were also some issues with memorability as most of the pages failed to have secondary navigation or breadcrumbs. It was very easy to get lost, and hard to remember how you arrived at a specific page.

We conducted a Competitive Analysis to help us consider how we can refine Eco-Stylist’s strategy of connecting the users to ethical, stylish clothing options.

Frank and Oak and wearwell are online companies where you can get responsibly sourced clothing options curated for your look. We found that in comparison, Eco-Stylist limited user freedom, by not providing access to styling recommendations online. Based off of this analysis, we decided it would be important to include some type of assessment, fit/sizing guides, and personalized style recommendations. Though there is space on the site for customer reviews, it doesn’t appear that users are encouraged or incentivized to rate the products, especially in consideration that the products is ultimately purchased on a different website.

Next, we created Screener Surveys to find users who shop for clothes.
The surveys were sent out via LinkedIn, Facebook, and direct message. We received 66 completed surveys back, with a total 21 who were open to participate in a round of interviews.

Moving on to User Interviews, of the 21 willing participants, together my team interviewed 16.
All of the surveys were moderated via Zoom. Our participant group consisted of 8 males and 8 females between the ages of 23–36.

Define

Through Affinity Mapping, we were able to isolate some of the common concerns of the users in shopping for clothing online.

“The biggest thing is not really knowing how something will fit or look like on me. To me the big drawback is the inaccuracy.”

“If I found out that the brand is making some kind of slavery job or, you know, trying to take advantage of people, I think I would stop buying from them.”

We came up with a User Persona and Storyboard to further illustrate the user need, and develop the problem statement.

Scenario: Austin orders the wrong size jeans, and discovers a way to never do that again, while being green!

The problem: Consumers need a way to easily educate themselves about responsibly sourced clothing and purchase this clothing online with confidence.

Develop

Sketches & Wireframes

User Flows & Site Map

Prototype

Usability Test Analysis

Scope:

ECO-Stylist’s redesigned prototype has new user flows implemented that need to be tested to determine where revisions need to be made.

Scenarios:

Task 1 — Shop the collection and create a profile

Task 2 — Find a dress and buy it

Task 3 — Write a review for the purchased item

Task 4 — Find information about sustainability

Insights & Recommendations

The next iteration of Eco-Stylist’s redesigned prototype needs to follow trending patterns familiar to experienced online users. The navigation bar, shopping cart, and establishing the benefits of creating a profile need to be tweaked and revised for a better user flow and experience.

Key Recommendations:

• Make the navigation bar and website hierarchy clear with proper labels and relevant information accessible.
• Implement trending patterns familiar to experienced online users (ie. Shopping Cart animation).
• Make it clear to the user why creating a profile is beneficial to them.
• Add images for tabs missing visuals. Even if it is not functional, it helps paint the picture for the user.

Next Steps

1. Sizing & fitting was a user need, but we could not create a compelling-enough prototype in the limited timeframe and user testing. It would be nice to be able to spend more time exploring this feature in depth,
2. Build out gender customization options for the purpose of inclusivity, allowing users to have options curated for male, female, neutral/unisex attire, giving the user complete control of the personalization of their style.
3. Revise some button labels for smoother navigation.
4. Work more intently with stakeholders to ensure that designs are cohesive with business strategy. We were too far along in the process to pivot upon discovery that we may not be in sync. Possibly consider facilitating site redirect, while still maintaining personalized features.

As the Research Lead, my contributions to this project consisted of the following:

• Asserted the research plan to collect data via interviews.
• Led the decision-making on survey and interview questions. Facilitated user interviews.
• Performed a competitive analysis on other websites.
• Synthesized user responses through affinity mapping.
• Drafted storyboard, highlighting user pain points.
• Identified the problem statement from our research.
• Contributed to the ideation of solutions through a design studio. Provided sketches and wireframes.
• Provided feedback on the Axure prototype.
• Compiled all our work into a Keynote presentation