White Bird
An App for getting fashion inspiration, utilising clothes, and reduce fashion waste
White bird is an outfit planning app that suggests daily outfit to the user and helps them to utilize cloths and get inspiration.
Nowadays there’s a huge waste problem in the fashion industry, The ultimate goal of this project is to help customers to utilize their cloth to prevent unnecessary waste and the same time for this annoying but important daily routine.
‘’In 2014, over 16 million tons of textile waste was generated.’’
- The United States Environmental Protection Agency.
While the consumption of clothing is going up, decreasing clothing utilization is one of the main reasons to cause textile waste.
Outfit planning is a small thing that annoying most of us every day. It’s not only time-consuming but also could be very costly. The lack of utilization would cause a huge waste and bad purchasing habit.
The production of the fashion industry and the waste of purchasing unnecessary fashion items are always big problems since it has a big impact on the environment and resources. Helping the consumer to utilize their clothes and purchase wisely would not only improve the situation but also pointing to the consumer's daily pain point.
The idea came to my mind when I had a conversation with a friend of mine, As I roughly checking from the internet, there is not so much product solving the problem and pain point effectively. So I decide to explore this topic.
The strategy was to focus on the core problems and targeting them by providing valuable features in the early phase of product design.
Before starting to investigate competitors product, I made hypothesis in terms of the problems my user might wants to solve:
The approach is to devise a lean initial product concept first, in order to iterate quickly, with a clear focus. To achieve that, I wrote down key experiences to validate in the next step.
Product experience to be validated (1st version)
The idea was validated with a survey and a few customer interviews. From the research, the pain point was confirmed with the real customer as well as the customer behavior and struggle was gathered.
Before I work further on this idea, it's important to know if it's desirable for the users. I ran a quantitative survey (34 answers in total) to find out demographic patterns and narrow down the user pain point, then a few qualitative interviews to go deeper into the problem.
My hypothetical value proposition was real according to the result. I also learned how much time & money the user spend, get to know their pain points and how are they dealing with the problem for the moment.
With the help of the competitor audit, I was able to understand the market, collect UX patterns, and create a competitive advantage.
I searched all possible direct/ indirect competitors from fashion articles and App Store, end up a very short list to research in detail. Standards, best practices, and gaps are gathered and compared.
From the competitor audit, I’ve learned that although my direct competitors have very similar features, they have UX problems in very different ways. (design outdated, maintenance issue, etc…) I analyzed the UX patterns and to avoid their shortcomings and to fill the gaps.
By analysing the competitors I realised a pure utilisation tool require too much investment from the user until they get full benefits; A usage habit could be formed by community and frequently updated content.
With the result from user research and competitor analysis, I decide to narrow down the key experience to three main points.
Key product experience (2nd version)
UX design process was proceeding as: Content inventory, Key user flow, information architecture, and wire-flow.
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Get daily Outfit Recommendation
The user gets daily outfit recommendations directly from the home page, according to the weather and based on the user’s closet.
Virtual Closet
The source of the virtual closet is mainly core fashion pieces provided by the app, which the user can easily select. Of course, the user can also add their own items.
Outfit Planning
Outfits could be saved from recommendations and plans in the calendar in advance.
1. Product strategy v.s. UX design
I realized how important the UX design should be aligned with product strategy, especially in the early stage of the product design, so that the experience you’re providing to the customer is unified and unique among all the other competitors.
2. Planning & Prioritization
Unlike the projects at work, a personal project could take forever for a perfectionist like me. I was enjoying such freedom to learn and create, but paying attention not to overseen the goal and priority.
2. Next step
Right now the usability test of the first version of WhiteBird app design is on going. I'm exited to hear the feedback! Later on this case study will also be updated. Stay tuned!