Duration
2 months
Lauren Chun
Hima Bijulal
Sui Li Chan
Team Members
Figma, FigJam
Tools
UX Research
Heuristics
User Testing
Wireframing
Card Sorting
User Personas
Mockups
Surveys
Skills
Known Source is tackling the issue of excess in the fashion industry by providing consumers with a platform to browse and purchase items from trusted second-hand dealers. While the site has been in beta mode, Known Source has been gathering its own users to test the platform. The tests have reported usability-related issues that hinder users’ shopping experiences.
This project aimed to identify these usability issues through our own research methodologies and redesign features that support users and their shopping experience while ensuring that Known Source’s mission statement, intentions, and goals are properly conveyed.
Overview
Background
Excess continues to adversely affect fashion at a global, industry, and individual level. It's estimated that 92 million tons of textile waste is created annually by the fashion industry. In addition, luxury brands have been reported to be destroying overstocked goods. Excess has also caused second-hand fashion to suffer: marketplaces are overcrowded with products, making it difficult for buyers to discover quality clothing, and resell their own clothing.
Known Source is tackling the problem of excess in fashion by creating a platform where users can browse and buy clothes from trusted second-hand ‘Dealers’. Customers buy with trust, direct from their established community of sellers, ‘Dealers’, who are charged a commission per transaction. Customers can also send back their clothing to Known Source at any point in the future: Known Source will sell the clothing to the customer. This process is what Known Source calls “Circular Curation”.
The website is a collaborative ecosystem for second-hand specialists, dealers, and fashion lovers.
Understanding the Problem
Before hiring a UX team, Known Source emphasized on showcasing the company's motto and branding. However, this led to little user testing being conducted, thus resulting in usability issues that hindered the overall shopping experience. Recently, the website has been in beta mode (knownsource.co.uk), and they have received feedback from their own round of user testing that highlighted the need to prioritize user experience. As a result, the Known Source team has recognized this as an opportunity to address these usability issues and improve the platform before its full launch.
My team and I started the research process by conducting user interviews that includes both experienced and non-experienced second-hand shoppers. We wanted to:
uncover pain points hindering each type of user and their shopping experience
understand the shopping user flow that a user takes from start to finish
determine the successes and engagement features that already exist in the beta phase
Gathering Insights
During the user interviews, each user was given a task to complete. I was in charge of creating user journey maps that recorded what actions users were taking to complete the task, the pain points in each stage, and what were some potential opportunities for areas of improvement.
The following are some of the user journey maps produced:
My team and I synthesized the collected data from the user interviews and the user journey maps and organized it using the process of affinity mapping. We took the interview responses and grouped them according to a common category. Our findings gave us an idea of what features needed the most redesigning. Some of the insights include general shopping details (e.g. product information, item details), UI and copy issues, and details concerning dealers.
Based on the insights gathered, we narrowed down the project scope into 3 target problems:
Features that create communities on the platform
Establishing trust between buyers, dealers, and Known Source
Support sustainability through fashion
Understanding the Interface
To further understand our platform structurally, we produced an in-depth heuristic analysis of the beta site on both desktop and mobile screens. We did this because the desktop and mobile are the top two ways in which many users from our interviews use to online shop. By analyzing the two forms, we can better understand some of the underlying shortcomings present in the beta phase.
Our analysis ran parallel in agreement and supports our insights that we’ve found in our user interviews. Some of the issues we found upon completing the heuristic analysis includes:
inconsistent information
no fixed sizing guidelines
dealers are lacking information on their about page
accessibility
color contrast do not meet guidelines
pop ups and moving text are a common feature making screen readers inaccessible to use
UI features provided little to no feedback
Problem Statements
After reviewing our findings from the user interviews and analyzing the beta interface, my team concluded 3 problem statements that will set out our project trajectory.
How might we utilize Known Source’s ethos about circular curation and create a community within the platform?
How might we create a more seamless online shopping experience for the customers?
How might we allow users the ease of finding items that also support sustainability through fashion?
Survey and User Persona
Now that my team has found a clear direction and problem to solve, we took one step further by curating a survey of 20 questions which were used to better understand our potential customer base and their expectations/challenges from platforms similar to Known Source. We wanted to pinpoint some of the realistic characteristics that represent Known Source’s primary audience. We were able to get 47 responses to our survey questions.
Some of the highlights from the survey are as follows:
56.1% of survey takers have regularly indulged in online shopping or browsing over the past few months. 34.1% have also periodically done the same. Every survey taker has done online shopping or browsed online stores at least once.
22% of survey takers said that environmental and climate change concerns are the reason they have made the choice of buying second-hand. Despite this number, a similar number of people have said that they barely care about the sustainability aspect of shopping secondhand. Therefore, the data is divided on this front.
The most common reason why people buy second items seems to be to "save money", "sustainability", "exclusive designs" and a variety of unique products. Saving money is the most popular reason for thrifting.
The quality of products is the most important criterion for shoppers when they consider buying an item from a particular vendor. The aesthetic style of the products and the trust in brand value are among the most popular criteria when choosing brands while vintage shopping too.
Unavailability of sizes, damaged products, overpriced tags on trendy items, poor documentation in the form of photographs on e-commerce websites, and overwhelming options are all pain points we were able to extract through this survey.
We created a persona informed by our survey responses:
Design and Ideation
According to the problem statements, we proposed the following features as potential solutions:
Clarify UX copy text
Accessibility: improve color contrast and reduce pop-up infographics
Display profiles of Founders and Dealers to increase credibility and trust
Emphasis on Known Source’s ethos of “Circular Curation”
Better product description (how many pieces are left, condition, sizing, etc.)
Direct messaging between dealers and buyers
Allowing buyers to view what communities are saying/buying
Allow buyers to add item to wish list so that when the item comes back, they can be notified for it and potential purchase
Prototyping
At this stage, our team realized that it was impossible to redesign everything within the time span that was given to us. To tackle this issue, we decided to design mobile wireframes based on a series of user flow. This way, we can pitch our ideas based on features that supports better user experience without needing to produce the whole site. This was the user flow that we dependent on:
Taking the 3 target problems extracted from our initial research, we continued to sketch out the solutions. Below are some of the sketches that we produced as a team.
We then brought our sketches into Figma for wireframing. Here are some of the highlights from our first round of prototyping that addresses the 3 target problems.
Iterating
Based on our first round of wireframing, we tested with some users to find out what design areas that are still lacking. Our testing revealed that while users are able to identify the general process of purchasing an item of second-hand clothing, there were still hesitations on the trust and credibility of Known Source founders and the different dealers on the site. These are some of the other key points from the testing:
Want to see the price of the other items under the similar items section without actually clicking into it. The font is too tiny and I want more info on the condition of the clothes
Are the star ratings for the product or the dealer. Do second-hand items need a rating system?
The difference between Wishlist and Favorites is unclear.
Renew is a confusing word.
Needs more indication of the credibility of the dealers.
Our user testing allowed us to retrace our designs and create improvements. Here are some of the major changes made:
