Olivia Santos

how might we prioritize confident and comfortable fashion that keeps style at the foundation?

The 4 main variables I decided to compare included whether a clothing purchase was necessary, if the search-to-cart process offered personalization, if they offered users style inspiration, and the capability to store personal inventory on the service/application. While Pinterest’s strengths lie in resembling a search engine for style inspiration, services like Poshmark and Stitch Fix provide a larger database of buyable items, whether pre-owned (Poshmark) or at a remarkable discount (Stitch Fix). All three services rely on external sources to provide inspiration for how a user might dress or style their clothing, but none of them take advantage of what’s already in the user’s wardrobe.

Keeping Olivia’s wardrobe priorities and needs in mind, I came up with 4 nonnegotiable design features I wanted to integrate into my design solution:

After establishing these anchor features, I figured the most feasible type of design would be a mobile application; plus, the services I mentioned prior all have mobile interfaces themselves, and I wanted to be mindful of the hypothetical learning curve for users of those services to become familiar with styl.it. 

To gather deeper insight into this problem space and gain a deeper understanding of people’s relationships with clothing, I brought 5 questions centered around “fashion” to my user interviews.

Upon interviewing people in my community (ranging from college students to post-grad YAs), I concluded 3 shared sentiments

Not every design solution is completely novel—I knew mine would probably overlap with preexisting fashion services and applications. After some initial market research into some of the leading services for personal styling (Pinterest, Poshmark, and Stitch Fix), I was able to identify a gap of opportunity for my design to provide new and practical impact for a similar demographic of users; that is, primarily young adult and middle-aged women looking to streamline their wardrobe options.

• The user should be able to log the clothing items in her closet and keep track of inventory

• The user should have the freedom to customize and categorize the types of styles they want to wear

• There should be some kind of community aspect for searching and sharing style inspiration

• There should be one central place to access both the user’s closet and their inspiration

Initially, I worked on layout design and the information architecture of the app, exploring questions such as:

What is the size of this primary component in relation to this secondary component? Where should essential buttons be placed on the screen that would align with users’ preexisting mental models of app navigation? Does this look too clunky, or is there more room to add elements?

I also made side notes for more complex design ideas that I could test out later through prototypes, and mapped out basic user flows that could reinforce the 4 features aforementioned.

The first Figma mockups I drafted up captured the essence of what I had envisioned for the final product, such as uploading clothing items into the app and having a closet overview that made it easy to visualize outfit pairings. Standard clothing categories were neatly displayed and the components were easy to spot. However, it still needed a lot of refining since the overall UI looked a bit outdated and visually stale. The interface was missing something as it felt flat and one-dimensional. Some of the affordances were also vague, such as the blue dot notification next to the “Tops” label.

click on any image to enlargen

styl.it has a special place in my heart because it's the first design project I birthed (and the first time I learned and used Figma). I’d like to extend gratitude to my freshman year design professors, Chase Airmet and Sandra Sweat, for encouraging me and guiding me every step of the way! They kindly gave me direction in becoming familiar with research and design methodology and I greatly value their contribution to this project. 

Of course, styl.it has many opportunities for growth. Because it was a class project with time restraints, the screens and prototypes I presented back then for my final were developed minimally. Other considerations for improvement include conducting more interviews to glean deeper insights and connecting with real stakeholders for scalable impact.

THANK YOU FOR READING UNTIL THE END ◡̈