SwapFashion App
The project centers on developing an app designed to help users adopt and maintain sustainable behaviors in their daily lives. The primary goal is to provide an engaging and user-friendly experience that motivates and supports individuals in making environmentally conscious choices. Through a combination of engaging content, actionable tips, and community engagement features, the app aims to simplify the process of living sustainably and foster long-term behavioral change.
With the help of my colegues, Anca and Roxana, I set out on a quest to discover a digital solution that is simple, easy to comprehend, yet interactive and useful, aiming to promote the adoption of sustainable behaviors. We collaborated through the research and exploration phase, where we came together to explore and analize insights, findings and opportunities.
Connecting sustainability with behaviours
We started diagnosing the project with looking into sustainable behaviors as a whole. We chose to start with desk research, as a cost-effective and time-efficient method, making it a practical starting point for gathering initial insights and identifying key areas of focus. We build a knowledge base, got a clearer understanding of the sustainable landscape and also started identifying gaps and opportunities.
Our research revealed:
Even if in Romania sustainable behaviors are far from ideal, with 48% of Romanians occasionally being involved in sustainable activities and only 15% actively involved, there was a whopping 80% of responders who wish to embrace a more sustainable life style.
Starting from a very positive premise, we outlined our research goal:
“Explore the experiences of people with sustainable behaviors and identify potential technologies that could support them in adopting and implementing these practices.
What are the most frequent and significant challenges or obstacles encountered by users interested in sustainability when adopting sustainable behaviors in daily life, according to our definition (such as responsible shopping, preventing food waste, using sustainable transportation, etc.)? Additionally, what would motivate them to adopt these behaviors more often and consistently?”
This served as a stepping stone in shaping our initial survey questions, which then guided our interview questions for the user interviews.
After distributing the survey and conducting 10 interviews, we analyzed all the data we gathered. As we were looking at a lot of unstructured and complex data, we had to organize data into clusters, get deeper insights, identify patterns.
Armed with a lot of organized data, insights, connections, we rolled-up our creative sleeves and started to generate a wide range of ideas to address user needs, solve problems, and create innovative solutions, which led to multiple opportunities.
How does the competition do it?
Further competitive analysis was done to better understand key strenghts, weaknesses, user experience and to identify opportunities for improvement and differentiation.
I reviewed competitors platforms/app, looking at swap process, user onboarding, point system/direct transactions.
Key takeaways
A deep dive into the sustainable fashion swap scenery led me to identify users needs for an easy and quick swap process, which promted me to choose a clear process, where the user just picks the category of the item, and the listing(images, description, categorising and pricing being done for them).
Another aspect was choosing a points system as opposed to the percentaje payout or direct transaction the competition offers. Users getting points encourages swapping and upholds the whole sustainability purpose of the app. Earned points are based on what the appraised value is and not what others want to pay for it. The major advantage of the points system being that the user is enabled to choose what they want to shop for and are not constrained by the availability or others to switch their item in direct swapping.
It's time to get visually creative
The app design started with building the user flow which had 3 main branches: onboarding users, upload swap and purchase swap.
I took the flows and built them into an initial design exploration for the app.
Simplifying innovation to ensure intuitive flows
With our target users being somewhat accustomed with the e-commerce aspect of the app I wanted to make sure that the innovative swap flow was easy to understand and use. With the app all prepped up, prototyoped and ready to be experienced, I did two rounds of usability testing. While the idea was very well received and praised, it was apparent that:
1. Two of the main flows of the app, namely the upload swap and purchase swap was not intuitive and easy to use.
2. Some users struggle with understanding the process of uploading swaps and getting points
Upload Swap flow 1
Upload Swap flow 2
Purchase Swap flow 1
Purchase Swap flow 2
How it works
Explore the latest prototype below: