In the last decade fast fashion consumption has been rapidly increasing and consumers, especially the younger generations, are looking for ways to make fashion sustainable. There are many ways to do this; thrifting, donations, clothing swaps, and even renting. Renting is increasing in popularity and is expected to grow more than 10% year by year until 2027 (FashionUnited, 2021).
Create an end-to-end mobile app that reduces fast fashion waste and can be used for fashion inspiration.
An end-to-end mobile app which allows users to list, rent and swap clothing items. Additionally, you can follow your favorite users for style inspiration.
We want to know users values and their pain points so that we can design a clothing rental and swapping mobile app.
- Fashion rental is a type of access-based consumption that takes place when people use a fashion good without ownership being transferred (Land and Armstrong, 2018; Yuan and Shen, 2019; Lang et al., 2019, 2020).
- The clothing rental industry was worth a total of $3.9 billion in 2019, with the US and EU holding a combined 80% of the market. By 2025, the industry is expected to have ballooned to more than $7 billion (Statista).
- Fashion rental can be organized either as a peer-to-peer (PtoP) or as a business-to-consumer (BtoC) platform (Iran and Schrader, 2017).
- Users concerns about fashion rental often involved a lack of trust towards other participants, doubts about the hygiene of rented items and fears of damaging them, as well as issues related to the need to give back the chosen garment when it was felt to be yours (Mukendi and Henninger, 2020).
- < 1% of the total US clothing market (according to GlobalData), rentals grew 24% compared to 5% for others (Reuters, 2019).
- The environmental impact of frequent deliveries of rented clothes (Zamani et al., 2017), and increased water and energy consumption for laundering needs to be taken into account in assessing sustainability measures.
- Users second hand shop for environmental reasons
- Users want affordable clothing
- Most users want filters and people in close proximity
- 5/5 are concerned about hygiene and their item being ruined
- 4/5 are willing to pay more for luxury items
- 4/5 felt better purchasing secondhand
Define the scope of the project and its information architecture.
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Determine the navigation and informational flow on the website.
To show the renting process flow with decisions in mind.
I started thinking about the layout and design of the app.
I grabbed my pen and paper and started sketching ideas for the screens based on the user research.
I began creating wireframes of important screens.
I created a brand identity from the ground up.
From my user flow and 1-1 interviews, I identified key moments in the user journey and focused my efforts on the screens that were most important in the renting process.
In order to check whether or not the screens work as intended, I set up a prototype in Maze and conducted usability testing to gain insight on the apps functionality.
I created an interactive high fidelity prototype in Maze to test the usability of the website.
I used the data from the usability test (affinity map) to create a priority matrix in order to identify which revisions were high priority and focussed on those fixes first.
The main revisions which were feasible for the time constraint.
The goal of this project was to create an end-to-end mobile app that allowed users to rent and swap clothing with others in the Copenhagen/Malmö area.
Well I like to think so, I had a 100% completion rate and quotes from usability participants like...
"Your app looks great and I love the concept! I love the look, and the way everything is laid out makes it simple to use and understand. Great work!"
"I think everything was pretty clear! It reminds me of a lot of shopping / second hand apps like plick, depop, with a hint of a social media app flow. So I thought it was very intuitive to use. Good job!"
"I think the overall UI was pretty clean and easily learnable!"
"Honestly, at first glance everything looked really good! Nice job!"
I would add various features to the app
Throughout this process, I learned a lot about product design and marketing. I implemented various user research strategies and designed with error prevention in mind. I also learned the importance of balancing user needs with business goals.
Next time I will...
