Overview
This project was made in collaboration with a partner.
The goal of this project was to create a well-crafted shopping app to engage the customer and create a seamless shopping experience with easy discovery of new items. The primary function was to discover new brands, shop, and share with friends. The target audience were design-conscious consumers aged 15-40.
My partner and I decided to create Roots, a sustainable clothing app. Fast fashion is an increasing problem, and we wanted to tackle this issue. To do this, a variety of verified sustainable fashion brands were featured on the app. We also introduced a points system to encourage consumers to donate or send their clothes to Roots to be properly recycled.
User Interviews
Before getting into the app, we conducted interviews to our target audience. The questions regarded their favorite shopping apps in order to learn their habits and what they need, value, and desire. This would help us start the building blocks of our app.
After conducting these interviews, we realized the lack of mainstream sustainable fashion apps with the exception of second-hand shops. We wanted to create something that would make discovery and access to eco-coconscious brands as easy as other fast fashion brands.
Competitive Analysis & User Flows
For the competitive analysis, we chose to use ASOS. ASOS is a British online fast fashion retailer, primarily aimed at young adults. The app features multiple brands, allowing for a wide variety of clothing choices. This is similar to what we wanted to do with our app, which was to feature existing sustainable brands all in one place. We then created a user flow of ASOS, and then used it as a base to make a user flow for our app.
Personas
We then created personas based off of our user interviews. We did this to better understand and empathize with the users. This is also useful to help meet user needs and expectations when we later start building the app.
Lo-Fi Prototype and Feedback
Using the user flow as reference, we then created our lo-fi prototype. This first round of prototyping focused entirely on placement and functionality rather than design. We then conducted multiple user tests in order to improve the next round of prototyping.
Moodboard, Type, Color, and Logo
While assembling our moodboard, we focused on photos that felt fun yet clean. We used a naturalistic color scheme, with an ivory, deep brown, and an olive green.
We decided on Meursault VF for the primary type. We chose this for its authentic and bold look. We complimented this with the Montserrat typeface for its clean and stylish appearance, and for its ability to pair well with many other typefaces.
We named the app Roots because we wanted to support brands that maintain sustainable practices from the beginning (or from the 'roots') to the end.
We kept our logomark simple, using Meursault VF to help it stand out. As for the logo mark we created an abstract root which connects to form a circle, which represents the mission of our app. The logomark inspired the design of the app, which features wavy lines throughout.
Hi-Fi Prototype & Feedback
In this round, we focused on improving our prototype and we also introduced design. We did one more round of user testing to tackle any other issues there may be.
Final Prototype
Research & Image Sources
https://www.asos.com/us/
https://goodonyou.eco/
https://unsplash.com/
https://www.pexels.com/