Duration
4 weeks
My Role
Ideation
User Interface
Wireframing
Prototyping
Iterating
Team
Devina (UX Designer)
Lucy (UX Designer)
Brianna (UX Designer)
Me (Lead UX/UI Designer)
As an online shopper myself, I've noticed just how oversaturated the online market is with fast fashion brands. Sustainable clothing alternatives are severely undervalued and thus hardly get promoted, which is terribly inconvenient when I want to search for more eco-friendly clothing options. This sparked the initial question: how can the process of finding sustainable clothing alternatives be easier for online shoppers?
Ecothread is a browser extension designed to educate users about the negative effects of fast fashion brands while also offering more sustainable clothing alternatives, which happens automatically as the user is shopping.
Inform
Raises awareness about the environmental impacts of fashion brands through concise but significant data gathered from online sources
Guide
Provides suggestions of sustainable clothing items similar to the ones in the user’s cart, all conveniently in one place
Encourage
Save our recommendations by favoriting items and create collections to find clothing pieces easier later
Designing a tool that is both convenient and accessible will more likely encourage consumers to rethink and change their shopping habits.
Articles by popular websites such as The Good Trade, Sustainably Chic, and Glamour list a ton of sustainable fashion brands to shop at, but they don't explain exactly why they are eco-friendly.
Good On You is a website and app that provides more detailed information on the environmental implications of various clothing brands with a simple rating score from 'We avoid' to 'Great'. While it is a useful reference to consumers, it still requires them to manually research in the brand they want to shop at. This can be difficult if they don't even know where to start.
We want to make this process as seamless as possible for those who may not want to put in that extra effort.
The extra step to remember and take action would cause friction between the shopper and our product because most people don't want to interrupt their shopping session to check a website or pull out their phone to use an app. So, our team looked to a different idea. We found that a browser extension would be the best option because of 3 main reasons:
The extension would be quick to access with just a few mouse clicks
The extension would be available on every clothing brand website that a user is shopping on
The extension would automatically collect and provide information without the need for users to switch the webpage
Julia Elias is a full-time nurse and part-time fashion influencer. While she currently shops at fast fashion brands due to the limited free time she has, she wants to become more mindful about her shopping habits and promote more sustainable clothing brands to her followers.
Rose Mao, a college student struggling with a shopping addiction, wants to shift to a more sustainable wardrobe of high-quality basics rather than inexpensive fast fashion clothing pieces. However, she does not have easy access to sustainable alternatives due to the lack of nearby thrift shops.
We converted these sketches to wireframes and then to a high fidelity prototype. Then, we presented the design to our representative users for feedback.
Based on their suggestions, I continued to iterate on my designs with 4 major areas of improvement:
This was my first major UX project serving as the lead designer. It was certainly a challenging role because I had to take on a lot of tasks such as creating the initial sketches and wireframe, improving the design based on user feedback, and standardizing the UI components, all in a very limited amount of time. But by getting support from my team members and receiving helpful advice from my professor, I gained more insight about the entire design process.
Usability testing is VERY crucial in the design thinking process. Initially, I believed that I knew what was best for the target user base because I was also a part of it myself. My team created this product because we are aware of the consequences of fast fashion and wanted a solution that would encourage us to improve our own unsustainable shopping habits. So, while we might have had good ideas to begin with, I didn't truly know how useable and practical certain features were until we tested it with users.
Never sacrifice user experience for aesthetics. The navigation icons in the original prototype were unlabeled because I made the assumption that people would know what they meant. However, while there are universal icons such as 'search' and 'trash', all other icons have ambiguous meanings and therefore need to be labeled. Simply adding labels would eliminate any confusion and frustration, creating a much more seamless user experience. While unlabeled icons can save space and may look more "aesthetically pleasing", it will never outweigh the benefits of easy icon recognition.
