Infinite

Overview

Process

Empathize

To begin the project, our team outlined a preliminary project goal and our target user base.
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Project Goal: Our initial goal was to persuade and encourage people to take small steps towards sustainability in regards to clothing disposal, with the understanding that someone doesn't have to be the most sustainable person in the world and that small efforts are not difficult.

Target User Base: Our basic target user demographic was young female and non-binary individuals in their late teens to early 30s.They would have a slight interest in sustainability but possibly not enough information on specifically sustainability in the fashion sphere.

Define

Literature Review

We read a variety of academic papers covering topics at the intersection of fashion and sustainability to further inform us on the research already done and guide our content.

Expert Consults

We reached out to over fifteen experts currently working in the area of fashion sustainability, including those working at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, FIT, etc. We prepared both a set of questions to be answered over email and interview questions, with those who replied choosing the option they were most comfortable with. The questions asked their thoughts on sustainability, fashion, and consumer behavior. We found that many of their responses were very similar.

User Interviews

We interviewed five individuals from our chosen target population to further inform and define our project goals. We asked the same five pre-chosen questions to all of our interviewees either over the phone or in person. The questions pertained to their knowledge about sustainable alternatives to disposing clothing, their habits regarding fashion sustainability, and whether they believe sustainability is partially a consumer’s responsibility.

Ideate

Based on our insights from the Define stage of our project, as well as feedback from classmates, our team was able to further define and specify our project goal and target user base.

Refined Project Goal: We decided to focus on sustainability with fashion, specifically with an end goal of encouraging sustainable repurposing or disposal of clothing that people no longer wear - we want to persuade and encourage people to take small steps towards sustainability. Contextually, we imagine the user to be at home, looking at their closet (this would occur either seasonally or a few times a year) with our app. Some methods we considered were touching on the topic to trigger an emotional response from the user or showing users accessible, potential ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Detailed Target User Base: Our target users are Gen Z and younger Millennials who identify as female or non-binary and are left-leaning, upper middle-class Americans. They would reside in an urban locality and have experienced higher education. Users should have at least a little bit of interest in sustainability but may not have enough information on sustainable methods of disposing clothing. However, they are interested in learning more about sustainable alternatives. Our project targets people who are open to developing more sustainable lifestyles but not 100% sure on the different ways they can do it. We want our target demographic to understand that sustainability isn’t all or nothing and that there are small activities they can do to develop more sustainable habits, particularly when it comes to fashion.

Prototyping

Low-Fidelity Prototypes

To begin our prototyping, we created three simple app layouts to display the main features of our app in different colors, layouts, and design themes. The features we chose to focus on were a scanning page and a waste management cycle (reduce, reuse, recycle) page.
We then had users test all three prototypes and answer questions regarding their design and usability.

Overall, there was a positive reaction with our target audience from our first round of prototyping. They liked the general goal of our app and agreed that it would help them achieve being more sustainable. Out of the three prototypes, prototype 2 was the most popular among interviewees.

Mid-Fidelity Prototype: Iteration 1

The next step of our prototyping was taking our most popular low-fidelity prototype and building it out to include more features and detail. In our first iteration we added our quiz, a feature we thought would increase personalization and enhance user experience, created our reduce, reuse, recycle pages, and overall added features to make it seem more like a real app.

Our user testing interviews for this prototype consistently disliked the same elements. These four complaints were the lack of consistency in terms of design, a dislike of the color palette, that one of our pages (specifically the reduce page) was very confusing, and that the quiz was confusing.

Mid-Fidelity Prototype: Iteration 2

Based off the user testing results for our first iteration, we edited some sections for our second iteration. Design wise, we decided to change the entire color theme of the app to green and also refined areas to make the overall design look more cohesive. Content wise, as some users were slightly confused that the reduce page seemed to be counterintuitive, we changed it to be encouraging second-hand selling. Users also felt that the quiz section was not useful, so we intermixed the questions across the different pages and ended up taking out the standalone quiz.

In this iteration we also added a "social" aspect, in the form of a community page. Our previous focus was on the individual user but by adding this section, we hoped to allow users to connect with one another. A goal for this prototype was to include more persuasive elements, so we incorporated social proof, intermixing, group norms, and some cognitive dissonance through the use of poll questions, a community page, and increase in interactiveness in our app.

High-Fidelity Prototype

For the last round of user testing, we had a mix of new interviewees and interviewees who we had previously interviewed for our user testing. Overall, our interview results were generally positive with few features being continuously complimented such as overall layout, the community feature, and the variety of options and content available for the user to explore, and a few small complaints - mainly regarding visual design aspects that were easily alterable.

Design wise, interviewees enjoyed the simple color scheme and the minimalist design that allowed for easy usability and readability. Many appreciated that while there were many options and sections, it was organized well and was not overwhelming. Users also enjoyed how the community page increased interactivity, both with the app and with other users. During user testing, a few users said that the forum questions prompted thoughts about their own sustainable behavior. One second-time interviewee mentioned remembering the app while going through their clothes after their last interview.

Most of the changes we made for our final prototype were more focused on the design of the app rather than the content. Based on our user testing results, we fixed the alignment across our screens so it was more consistent. We also changed the color of borders to make it less harsh, and matched the stylization across the board to match our target demographic and app theme.

Final Deliverables

In addition to our final prototype, our deliverables included a project paper (covering our area of focus, research and background, existing competitors, design, the importance and impact of our product, and potential next steps) and a Medium- or Tumblr-style blog post presenting our product to the world at large.