Solution Space

• What kinds of technological and non-technological solutions exist in the solution space?

  Technological solutions include platforms for inspirations such as Pinterest and Youtube, more interactive social media where users can share ideas, and tailored services that come with a fee. Non-technological solutions include fashion magazines, personal stylist, sales at shopping malls, and thread up goodie boxes.

• What issues in the problem space are well-responded to by existing solutions?

  They offer fashion advice and also resources for users to know where to buy the items. They target users' weaknesses and offer different approaches to solve them. Some are very personal and catering to individual style and needs. Other solutions such as YouTube and Instagram offer more options to the general public and provide inspirations. They solve the problem that users don’t know how to coordinate clothes and don’t know what style would look good on them.

• What is missing from the solution space?

  The long and tedious onboarding process to learn about users’ style and preferences is really inconvenient for users. For apps that offer inspirationscould offer better and more specific examples of how to dress a certain way. Moreover, many solutions offer clothing, but people still have to know and seek out the style they want. Websites could be more personalized but also budget friendly.

What’s Missing?

What’s missing from the solution space is a highly personalized experience, a succinct onboarding process or initial style quiz, budget friendly options, and a way to search through saved outfit photos. In our design, we hope to incorporate everything that is missing, so that our persona’s needs of building a wardrobe for special occasions, everyday, and the workforce can be fulfilled efficiently and effectively. 

 Ideation

Brainstorm Session:

After analyzing current solutions and user interviews, we each came up with ten design ideas. Here are some that I came up with:

Design Concept:

Then, we discussed the pros and cons of our initial ideas and eventually decided on a mobile app since it fits our persona and target users the best with its convenience and accessibility.

Key Tasks

• Onboarding: Make a profile with the personal info aka the onboarding quiz

• Exploring: Save one outfit that the user likes for the style: business casual, occasion: networking event, and price range: low ($1-50 per clothing piece).

• Sharing: Post an outfit photo in one of the social media groups for young women in the work industry, asking if it is a good outfit for a business casual meeting.

Task Relation

 Usability Testing

We created a mid-fi prototype and set up user interview protocols for usability testing. One of our evaluation goals was to test whether users could complete tasks using our prototype easily and effectively and to analyze their interactions with the app based on our defined metrics in order to make improvements to our app’s design and overall usability. Another evaluation goal was to see users’ reactions to the overall app’s purpose in helping people find outfits for specific occasions and to inquire about specific situations they would use this app in, as well as ask about their satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the app. 

Defining Metrics

• Effectiveness

• Learnability

• Error rate

• Satisfaction

• Emotional engagement

• Fit within existing practice

Participants and Recruitment

We recruited 8 college students who are interested in changing their fashion style, need fashion inspiration, or need help dressing for a new environment, such as jobs or internships. The test session was held over Zoom, and the participants were asked to screen share with us when completing required tasks on the prototype. A notetaker is recording their words, behaviors, and expressions in a comprehensive manner.

Data Analysis

1. Preferences in Profile Building: Participants struggled to find the “upload own style” feature, and it was physically hard to click and select their preferred styles.

2. Exploring Page: Participants didn’t know about the swiping function and weren’t sure about how to save a style that they like.

3. Groups Page: Participants were unsure of how to use the search with filter function, and the pictures were too small for them since there were three displayed in a row.

4. Navigation Bar: Participants were confused by the icons adopted. They couldn’t tell which icon represents which page.

UX Problem Instances:

UX Design Problems:

 Iterations & Explorations

By analyzing the data we collected from usability testing, we identified some design problems and ranked them according severity. While we addressed all these issues in our final design, we analyzed three major problems in detail and showcased them as below.

Uploading Image To Preference

• Problem: Participants struggled to locate where to upload their own style image.

• Solution: We decided to change the location of the uploading sign to a more prominent position so users could spot it easily.

• Rationale: The new design solution we implemented would increase visibility by moving it to a more prominent place and add constraints to limit users from taking other actions.

Navigation Bar Icons

• Problem: Icon misrepresentation interfered with participants’ ability to navigate to different features within the app.

• Solution: Since using a search icon did not seem to properly represent that this was the area that users save outfits, our solution was to switch the icon to a t-shirt, as this would be more indicative of the contents of the feature it navigated users to.

• Rationale: The solution aids in error recovery, as having a clearer icon to represent the outfit discovery feature will help users navigate to it if they accidentally click off the feature. The design is also filled in, in contrast to the other icons, increasing its visibility, which is important as this feature is the main feature of the app.

Style Saving in Exploring Page

• Problem: Users’ uncertainty in saving/discarding outfits in the Explore/Discover section of our app. Even though we included a double functionality of swiping right on a photo to save and the “save” button on the bottom, the swiping feature was either not used or used incorrectly the first time.

• Solution: A pop-up on the first outfit’s screen to explain the swiping feature as well as a second pop-up on the same screen to indicate the meaning behind each button below the images.

• Rationale: The new design would aid in error prevention, visibility in what the user should do next, and make it known to the user about our error recovery function.

 Reflection

There a lot of things that still needs to be improved in the app. For example, after evaluating the onboarding process and how effective the questions were in understanding users’ needs, we learned that there are other better metrics that we could adopt to offer better recommendations. The interaction to introduce users about the swipe function in the discovery page still needs to be improved. We are still trying to come up with more organic and natural ways. In the future, we are hoping to add in-app shopping function that links directly to online retail stores.

This is the first app that I designed that involved an onboarding process, which required a lot of user insights and evaluation. I was trying to gather as much information as possible about the user with the least steps possible. It was challenging to cram all that choices in such a small space.