WORN is an app that makes the buying and selling of luxury consignment more enjoyable - so you could spend more time discovering unique pieces curated for you and giving them a new home.
My Role: UX/UI Design
Tools: Figma
Team: Just me!
The Problem
The fashion industry has a huge waste problem. Consumers can help to change this by making more sustainable shopping choices - and buying secondhand is one of the best ways to do this.
Consignment apps tend to have an overwhelming amount of items, making the shopper have to sort through so much to find what they’re looking for. Many users who want to sell their items either don’t have the time or energy to go through the process of listing an item.
Both scenarios create users who want to buy and sell consignment, but have too much anxiety to actually do it.
The Goal
Discover
Already knowing about the negative impacts of clothing production on our environment and garment industry workers, I wanted to dig a little deeper into the connection between a solution for this, our personal relationship with clothing, and secondhand clothing.
I gathered some key facts:
Users say…
Ideate
Between all of the secondary and user research I did, it became very challenging to nail down what the actual problems are. I was able to see issues all across the board. I knew I had to figure out what the MVP (minimum viable product) was to be able to make the right design decisions going forward.
There Are Two Ways To Use A Consignment App; You’re Either Buying Items, Or Selling Them.
At the most basic level, the shopper wants to easily find what they’re looking for, and the seller wants to easily list items so they can make money. At the end, these users actions would be interacting with each other to be able to complete each of their user flows.
I continued to break these ideas down a bit more to start nailing down some possible solutions.
User Flows
What are the flows my user will have to go through to complete the most important tasks that this app provides?
I wanted to focus on personalization and simplicity to cut out product that my user might not want to see.
Wireframes
It was finally time to visualize my ideas. I created mid-fi wireframes so I can start testing if my solutions actually work. To test this out, I created a quick clickable prototype of my wireframes for guerilla testing.
Design
WORN aims to weave sustainability and curation throughout the entire user experience. A clean and minimal UI conveys a high end aesthetic, giving users a certain expectation of what they will find when using the app.
The Outcome
Creating a Personalized Account
The user will be able to personalize the app from the moment they sign up. Everything they see in their feeds will be based on what type of style they have, what sizes they wear, and what designers they prefer to see. They have the option to skip personalization here and adjust it later.
Buying an Item
The user can shop through the discover feed, their home page, or through the search category tab. The categories are broken down to easily find what they need. The user also has the option to turn their curated results on (showing only products the user would like) and off (showing all products on the app in this category).
Each product page will show sustainability statistics, giving users incentive to buy secondhand.
The checkout process is simple and only shows what the user needs to see. They can anticipate how many steps are involved through the labeled progress bar at the top.
Two Ways to Sell
There are two ways a user can sell their items. They can list items on their own, going through the whole process of taking photos and sending out the item. Or, the user can choose to send the item to us to list them for them - all they have to do is answer a few questions and ship it out.
Both options are simplified, with descriptions and photo examples of everything needed.
A personal favorite feature - the user can request packaging to be sent to them for free. For example, if I want to sell a pair of shoes but I don't have a box, I don’t have to dig around for something I might have lying around the house.
Additional Features
Here, you can see all of the subcategories within the shopping section. Users can also browse through their home screen, where they are shown new listings curated to their taste, and listings from other users they follow. They can also browse through the discover page, where they can discover new styles and designers that they may not be following; still curated to their tastes.
Within the users profile, they can adjust all of their preferences and settings, view previous orders and listings, and learn more about the environmental impact of their purchases and sales.
Users can interact with each other’s profiles by following their feed, private messaging, and saving listings to build a personal style library.
Results
Combining my experience in the fashion industry with design thinking methodologies has been an extremely rewarding, yet challenging process. I learned that even though I would use this product - I am not the user! It was challenging to completely separate my opinions from my users, but doing this only lead me to learn so much about their needs.
I learned how important feedback and testing is. As a designer I can iterate on my designs forever, but talking to users helped me to focus on the most important features to complete the tasks at hand.
As a result, I designed a luxury consignment app that reduced all user pain points, making it easy and enjoyable to use.