The Process

REQUIREMENT ANALYSIS & NEEDS IDENTIFICATION

To understand the motivation behind this project, I started by interviewing the stakeholders. Then I performed market research and competitive analysis to identify opportunities for improvement. I even took a guerrilla approach and asked random people on the street about our existing product.

Once I gathered enough information from the previous steps, it was time to talk to fashion bloggers and our potential users. This step helped me to go even dipper into the depth of fashion buying experience.

__ Stakeholder Interview

By Interviewing the stakeholders, I was able to investigate the business objectives and understand what success looks like. During these interviews I focused on the product vision, budget, scheduling, current technical constrains, existing users, and success criteria.

Once I had a good grasp of the requirements, I immersed myself in analyzing the existing documents and features. Doing so made me realize that the existing app couldn’t support any of the new requirements and if I wanted to satisfy the client I had to design the whole journey from scratch.

__ Market Research

According to the Fashion Blogging and Consumers research, 70% of the people who use fashion blogs as their primary source of information are 18 to 34 years old. In this age category, over 68% of female users indicated that blogs can influence their fashion buying decisions.
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For people 55 years old and older, blog ranked as the third most important source behind friends, family, colleagues and editorial articles.

IDEATION & CONCEPT GENERATION

I began the Ideation process by writing down all my findings and arranging them into different groups. Then, I shared them with the team and together we came up with different solutions that could ultimately satisfy the user’s needs. Once we had everything ready, I sketched out the solutions and used them in our user testing sessions. After each session, I iterated the design based on the feedbacks, until we find the best possible way of approaching the problem.

FINAL SOLUTION

Once I was done with the ideation process and had a clear understanding of what I needed to design, I created wireframes to dive deeper into layout details and pinpoint the specifics of navigations.

__ User Flow

Having figured out all the functionalities, I started to map out the end-to-end user experience.             

__ Competitive Analysis

Thanks to the technological advancements in mobile e-commerce, designers are pushing boundaries of innovation like never before. On the other hand, these advancements come with a set of limitations that affect the way users interact with the products. Limitations such as:
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-- User must incur a higher interaction cost in order to access the same amount of information.
-- User must rely on their short-term memory to refer to information that is not visible on the screen.
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In order to overcome these limitations, I started by analyzing other products that were competing in the same space. I wanted to fully understand what they were offering and how I could differentiate/better our product.

As I mapped my way through these applications, I looked for:
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-- Well-designed, easy-to-navigate interfaces
-- Key features and data organizations
-- Clear product pages
-- Easy checkout processes

STYLINITY
Fashion and lifestyle community, connecting brands, influencer and shoppers with shoppable content through social media.

__ User Interview & Survey

After completing the competitor analysis, I developed a list of questions about fashion bloggers and their followers. I wanted to explore the motivation behind their decision-making processes and to understand the path they take to achieve these results. Here is a sample of what I learned during these interviews:
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-- Users:
“I like how fashion blogs are available in an instant online without having to wait for a monthly magazine etc. It also shows clothes worn by real people and not stick thin models wearing ridiculously priced clothes.”
“I use blogs because it’s easy to find someone that you can relate to, whether it is by shape, size, age, ethnicity, budget or any other factors you enjoy. “
“Um, it depends on how much I like the item at first sight, and then if other people are wanting it, it’s like a synergy effect it makes me want it that so much more. I have to get that!”

-- Fashion Bloggers:
“On my fashion blog I like to wear clothes that are affordable and accessible for other people my age.”“Affiliates work a few different ways. Sometimes an ethical retailer will reach out to me personally and ask me to sign up for their affiliate program. So, I go sign up and get approved. Then, when I’m building a post about, say, what to pack for a trip to Bali, I log into the retailer’s website, grab a special link with tracking code, and use it in my post. When you click through and buy something, the retailer logs that sale.”
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__ User Persona

Although this application has both B2B and B2C markets, for the purpose of this presentation I decided to solely focus on the B2C aspect of the product.

Before the Ideation process, I wanted to clearly define who we were designing for.

Pose
Allow users to shop style with a global fashion community. Pose allows women to browse endless fashion inspiration and then to shop their favorite looks through an exclusive peer-to-peer marketplace.