Next Fashion Retails research group, who focuss on strategies to amplify the impact of sustainable purpose-driven fashion retailers within the industry
To address the challenge of low patronage in sustainable fashion stores, we aimed to enhance the in-store experience, fostering conversations about sustainability in the fashion industry, educating visitors on its importance, and ultimately increasing awareness towards the issue.
CX Research & Designer - Research report through comprehensive studies to understand customer journeys within sustainable fashion stores, and crafted an enhanced shop experience with multiple touchpoints to foster sustainability discussions; Visual Designer - Spearheaded the visual components, conceptualized and prototyped digital solution to elevate the user experience within the store.
Sustainability has become a well-known and significant global issue that is often discussed in today’s society. In reality, even though people are aware of the problem, not many of us act upon it. There are a great variety of sectors regarding sustainability, and it is arguably the most prominent issue confronting fashion brands nowadays. It is not too difficult to see more sustainable fashion stores around. However, the problem is that only a tiny portion of people shop for sustainable clothing items.
Sustainable fashion stores do not reach enough people, and sales figures are low. People are either unaware of sustainable choices or unwilling to consider them due to personal reasons (costs, beliefs, unawareness of the benefits, quality, and comfort). Sustainable purpose-driven shops are actively interested in shaping the sustainable fashion field, next to supporting the innovation for solutions. They crave the conversation about it with society, and our main goal is to create such opportunities for them. The shops are seeking a solution that helps them attract by-passers to step into the shop and start a conversation with visitors about sustainability in the fashion industry while creating awareness and educating them on the importance of sustainable fashion.
Passively extrinsic motivated shopper:
For this project's scope, the focus would be on a particular target group characterized by the following attributes: adults aged 30 and above with an average or above-average income. In addition, they are passively motivated and interested in sustainable shopping and are externally pressured and influenced by social media, friends, family, magazines, etc.
We focused on designing new shopping experiences within the space of sustainable purpose-driven fashion retailers to expand their clientele. For this purpose, we conducted different research methods to investigate the current issues and opportunities. With all the insights we have collected and analyzed, our group has created a brand new shopping experience in sustainable fashion stores by implementing multiple touchpoints.
Just a teaser, you can click through the floor plan that we created and check out what kind of touchpoints are implemented in the shop experience. In the following sections, I will walk you through the design process and also the touchpoints in depth.
We are a group of 5 UX design students, including Yulia Bauman, Aleksandra Naydenova, Liza Kovacs, Grizzly Bui Le Khanh Uyen, and I. We all conducted the same amount of research methods, generating insights and setting up user testing sessions together. The responsibilities within the group were equally distributed most of the time. In the design stage for this project, I was more responsible for visual design, documenting the process, as well as designing and prototyping digital solution.
In this research phase, 3 different directions were chosen to focus on and assess:
1) Sustainable fashion in general: definition of sustainability, the processes and business within the sustainable fashion industry;
2) Current shopping environment and experience of both target shops and unsustainable clothing stores.
3) Target groups: their shopping habits and attitudes towards sustainable shops/fashion.
The following research objectives would allow achieving the research aim:
With the above methods, we gathered a lot of materials and data, and two personas was made for the target group and one that represents the stores we are designing for. This will guide us in a design process and provide us with understanding of their common traits. Since it was a massive amount of information and materials, we brought into a synthese wall to map out their relatedness, but also to generate insights that we might overlook.
1. How to make people step in the shop - visual, what we show them (how to get their attention)
2. Once inside the shop - how to communicate about sustainability (how and what we tell)
a. What happens on our side (shops, brands, process)
b. What happens on your side (customer behaviour, after-care of clothes)
Based on the design vision, we came up with several HMW questions. When we were reviewing all the questions, we realized there were similar questions. Therefore, we decided to group them and create clusters for the questions, which are to attract people to step in the store, during visit (the full experience), use of space and increase customer’s awareness/knowledge. After that, we used dotvotting to select 1 HMW question under each category. The final HMWs are at the right side of the image below.
A quick recap of what we went through during the ideation process:
We generated a lot of ideas with the aid of different techniques. I won't overwhelm you with showcasing each single idea, but I would still like to show you some snaps to provide an overview of how the process actually looked like.
Each of us created several concept posters based on the ideas we had from the previous session. Next, we pasted all the posters on the wall as an overview and also invited other students and teachers to leave feedback on the wall.
We found it insightful to have the session of viewing concept posters with everyone and to gather feedback from others at the same time. However, since there were a lot of inputs, we decided to use dotvoting to filter out ideas that we would like to focus on and diverge from there.
After the dotvoting process, we had a follow-up discussion to share our thoughts. In our pool of ideas, we see that there are a lot of innovative ideas but also some that are easy to adapt. As we aim to design a toolkit for different fashion retailers, we want to be more flexible with the variety of options so that each retailer can decide which tool can be the best fit to their own store.
Therefore, we clustered our ideas into 3 directions:
Under each direction that we refined in the previous stage, we compiled different ideas that we voted in the previous and refine them to be a whole visit and shopping experience. Later, we applied dotvoting again to decide our final 3 concepts.
Mid-way through the design process, a feedback moment together with three retail store’s owners and a project leader from Next Fashion Retails was scheduled and we presented all three concepts to them. From the collected feedback, our group agreed that we had a “blind spot” with the concepts and took less consideration into creating a “fun shopping experience” but rather a more informative & tech-based appeoach. We discovered our clients are not so enthusiastic about technology implementation. We do understand that retailers, especially for small local stores, business goals and feasibility are important. However, we also found our creativity is being restricted when what they could accept in technology is QR code. Therefore, our group strived to balance the perspectives of retailers, keep room for creativity, as well as our initial design vision. At the end, we decided to go for the mixed direction, that involved both feasible and innovative ideas.
With our refined concept after the presentation, we created a desktop walkthrough model to mimic the touchpoints in the fashion store and its environment. We also act out scenarios based on different user profiles as our own testing. By acting out scenarios, we gained new insights and decided to adapted them .to improve the concept.
With several attempts in the desktop walkthrough model, our concept became more solid and we decided to bring the resulting concept to the next prototyping stage, where we aimed to build the touchpoints in a more advanced level.
We outlined the tree shape and it was then being shaped by a laser cut machine. However, because of the machine restriction, the tree can only be made in a smaller size. We tried to compensate for this by putting the tree on top of a stand or table during testing.
With the idea of letting users put their hand inside the drawer to touch the materials, we made the drawer 1) with the size that can fit some fabric 2)a hole for passing through by hand, meaning the diameter of the hole will be much
bigger than fist.
For this concept, we used Figma to prototype the table interface and set up the interaction commands. As our idea is that, when a user picks up one item, the corresponding area will start animating, we assign one keypad to each area (blue, red, yellow). So for example, if the user picks up the item on top of the blue circle, we (as wizard) will press [1] on the keypad to initiate the animation.
After the interface was made, I reserved a room with smart board that allows me to project the table. We first hung the clothes with a hanger from the top of the board and let users take it away. However, since the display board is interactive, it automatically interacted with the clothes fabrics without anyone touching it. Eventually, we had to adjust the prototype setting as below:
Users can still interact with the screen, meanwhile the animation will start when they pick up the clothes from the table. Please feel free to try out the interface below:
In order to recreate the feeling of an actual feeting room, we used big movable boards as walls, together with other easily-accessible materials such as a blanket for curtains, next to additional lights sources (Christmas lights, bed lights). Moreover, the fitting room solely relies on the space of the room, where it will be placed, therefore that has to be adapted accordingly.
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Our test plans were divided into two aspects, which are 1) testing each touchpoint individually; 2)setting up all touchpoints together in a room to create a clothing store environment and to test the experience as a whole.
In general, we want to evaluate whether our users feel curious and interact with different touchpoints, as well as whether the touchpoints “spice up” the shopping experience from users’ perspective. By doing so, we set up a room with all our touchpoints and below is our protocol of store settings:
Within the overall experience, we also have a test plan for each touchpoint. We created an observation note to record users’ behaviour and also had follow up discussion with them.
Since I was responsible for the interactive table, in this session I would like to mainly focus on this touchpoint and the store setup as a whole.
Before setting up the interactive table in the clothing store setting, we wanted to test the interface of the interactive table first. By doing so, when the user is touring the clothing store and encounters the table, he/she will be able to interact with an improved version and the shopping experience will become more coherent.
Because the test was focusing on the interface only, we decided to use iPad to imitate a mini version of table:
In regards to the store setup, I created this floor plan of showing how we placed touchpoints during testing. We had to change the position of touchpoints to adapt the space from our initial vision, because we were not able to reserve a room with a similar floor plan of the clothing store. In addition, we encountered limitations with the room equipments, which are:
1. Position of interactive table screen is fixed, it can only be next to the door
2. Setup of interactive fitting room requires socket, which only allow us to use the socket on the left side of the wall
Based on these, below is the floor plan of how our touchpoints were being setup together as a clothing store for the user testing:
With the 3 problem statements that we indicated in our design vision, we proposed 3 corresponding design directions to tackle the challenge:
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