Grid Rack: A Personal Closet Tracker
Conceptual Mobile Application
Problem
With the rise of social media and fast fashion outlets in recent years, turnover in fashion trends has increased exponentially. Whether it be the $3000 Shein TikTok hauls, the absurdly hyped Nike Dunks, or the seemingly countless Instagram influencers, it may appear impossible to keep up. A 2020 Princeton study states that “the fashion industry is currently responsible for more annual carbon emissions than all international flights and maritime shipping combined,” with greenhouse gasses estimated to increase by 50% within the decade if the industry maintains these rates. With this, following the latest trends shouldn’t be frowned upon, but the over-consumption that follows yields disastrous results in textile waste, exploitative labour practices, carbon emissions, and more.
Role
Type
User Researcher,
UX/UI Designer, Prototyper
Personal Project
Tools
Timeline
4 weeks
Figma
User Research
Conducting a User Survey
To better understand the average consumer and their consumption habits, I conducted a short survey and shared it on Instagram and various survey-sharing subreddits such as r/SampleSize and r/TakeMySurvey. Participants answered questions pertaining to their clothing consumption habits and knowledge of sustainable fashion practices.
Research Findings
Gender
Ages
Opinion on Fast Fashion
The survey reached 35 people, 70% being between the ages of 16 to 25 and 30% between ages 26 and 44. The majority of participants identified as female, but male participants and those who prefer not to say also took a significant portion of the survey. The participants were fairly split in terms of how often they buy clothing, with half consuming monthly and the other consuming either annually or rarely. Here, I found that most users particularly value the size, fit, and price when purchasing a garment. Surprisingly, it seems that a significant number of people are indifferent towards fast fashion. Some people have gone on to mention that it is necessary for fashion and that it is reasonable for those who cannot afford long-lasting, sustainable options. A result like this makes sense considering the majority demographic leans toward teenagers and young adults whose funds may be focused elsewhere (ie. school).
In addition, most people look in their closets and find themselves with nothing to wear. This could be due to a multitude of reasons such as finding an outfit for a specific occasion, a need for specific attire for a profession, or even having too many garments to remember. Regardless, this seems to hint at a need to consume more. Furthermore, 90% of participants find themselves purchasing multiple articles of clothing with similar characteristics despite already owning said garment. Interestingly, some participants supported this by noting that doing so reduces the frequency of laundry loads. Others have also mentioned that they had forgotten they had already owned something similar.
Lastly, the general outlook on sustainable fashion assumes that it is a costly effort. Most people seem to be aware of common sustainable efforts such as using sensible materials, paying fair wages for labour, being environmentally conscious, and buying secondhand. Surprisingly, an overlooked aspect that most of the participants first thought of was reusing garments they already own as “sustainable fashion.”
"Have you bought an item similar to something you already own?"
"What do you first think of when it comes to sustainable fashion?"
"Sustainable fashion is expensive!"
User Personas
Vanessa Lee, 21
Social Media Influencer & University Student
Vanessa is a confident, enthusiastic person who loves keeping up with current fashion trends and delivering meaningful content to her audience. Being a university student, she is mindful of her purchases and wants to lead a sustainable lifestyle.
Goals & Needs:
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Wants to allocate more time and money to live a healthier lifestyle.
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Follow a multitude of fashion bloggers across various social platforms for outfit and content inspiration.
Pain-points & Frustrations:
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Due to her studies, she doesn’t have enough time and inspiration to find and put together new looks to post on her social platforms.
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Prefers to spend as little funds as possible on her clothing, as she intends to move out of her parents' house.
Matthew White, 32
Entrepreneur, Coffee Shop Owner
Matthew is a bright and passionate entrepreneur who loves adventuring and trying new things. Having just opened a coffee shop, he wants to live a more minimalist lifestyle, putting as much as he can into his new business venture.
Goals & Needs:
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Hopes to open a second coffee shop location within the next five years.
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Wants to limit his daily spending to focus more on his business.
Pain-points & Frustrations:
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Starting a new business is very costly and timely.
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Finds that he owns way too many clothes at home to keep track of and wants to limit his closet to only to his essentials.
Solution & Proposal
Based on the survey, it seems as if most people are aware of making sustainable fashion efforts through educating themselves on the garments and how they were made, supporting sustainable brands, and opting to buy secondhand. Although these options are great in theory, they still promote buying and consuming more. On the smallest scale, the survey showed that most people overlook reusing the clothes they already own. With this, a report by the UK’s House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee states, “the most sustainable garment is the one we already own.”
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Buying Less and Wearing More
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Regardless if the clothes already owned are fast-fashion or not, breathing new life into these garments keeps them out of landfills. According to a report by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), prolonging the use of 50% of clothing by nine months would save 8% carbon, 10% water, and 4% waste per metric ton of clothing. Compared to the alternatives mentioned above, reusing and rewearing the clothes one already owns is the most accessible and economical option for the average consumer.
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With this, I propose a mobile application that helps users keep track of the clothes in their closets, declutter, and limit wasteful purchases. The application will be fairly visual, reminding users of the items that they already own. To combat duplicate over-consumption, certain articles of clothing can have custom settings limiting the number of items in each clothing category (ie. shirts, shoes, pants, etc). In addition, the application will have an explore feed where users can browse outfits posted by other users. These outfits will serve as inspiration for users along with making use of existing items in their closet through a feature showing users similar items in their closet.
Competitive Analysis
To better understand the market and its gaps, I looked into a few mobile applications with similar primary features to mine. I found that the main applications that dominated the personal closet organizer domain were: Cladwell, Style Book, and Smart Closet. Each application seemed to offer similar services in addition to logging in items from one’s wardrobe such as compiling outfits together, calendar planning, and offering closet statistics like frequency of wear and style.
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A common fault between the three applications involves a paywall of sorts, whether it be StyleBook’s $5 download fee, Cladwell’s $5/month subscription fee, or how shopping seems to be Smart Closet’s primary function. In addition, Smart Closet’s homepage mainly features a shopping catalogue, contrary to my main goals with my case study as it promotes consumption and spending. Based on the user interviews, as price is one of the user’s top priorities, making an economically-smart application seems to be the best direction to head in.
Another potential gap is the absence of a fully social-community-like setting to promote inspiration and a sense of hooking users to the application. The three applications seem to be fairly private and have a short user flow when it comes to logging clothing and doing not much else (besides shopping). For platforms like Smart Closet that do have an explore section, it seems more akin to an advertisement for the companies rather than being a personalized experience, with real people posting real images. This could be due to the explore section featuring professional images of individual garments taken against a white background rather than real people styling these items in practical settings.
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Despite the fact most of these applications have a database to search and add clothing, their functionality is lacking. For Cladwell, it has a fairly generic database where users are unable to search via brand name. Instead, users can either add their clothes via or are forced to scroll through an endless amount of items that may look similar to their clothes. As for Smart Closet, their database has users undergo a lengthy process, inputting a store address, looking through this store and clipping an image from their catalogue.
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It seems that most of the applications in this field specifically target a female demographic, given the colour palettes, iconography, and language used. Given the rise of the male fashion audience through social media, entertainment, and the sneaker community, it seems unwise to alienate this rising demographic. As fashion also leans more towards androgynous trends in recent years, fashion has also become much harder to define and categorize. Users should have more agency over the clothing they wear and how they represent their style (ie. creating their own closet categories, tags, and communities).
User Flows
Grey Box Wireframes
Style Guide
Full Fidelity Prototype
Onboarding Process
The user onboarding experience begins by giving the user options to either sign in using their email address or using information from other existing platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google to streamline the process. With this, the guest experience becomes personalized through prompts asking the user's preferred clothing preferences and styles. This information will be used to give the user a baseline of the content recommended to them later in the application.
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To give the user agency over their onboarding process, I included a skip option at the top right of their preference prompts. Their agency is also reinforced by the subtext, reminding users that they can change or add more to their preferences later on. To aid users with error control, I included a back button at the bottom, allowing users to change previous inputs made. Lastly, I also included a progress indicator at the bottom of the screen to reduce uncertainty and provide users feedback on the number of actions left necessary to complete the onboarding process.
Home Page & User Profile
The home page begins with the user's own outfits to support the idea of reusing one's own garments as "sustainable fashion." In addition, the user's following feed follows a two-column structure rather than one column to draw less attention to the other user's outfit, but rather as a thumbnail to quickly view as inspiration. When tapped, the post opens an overlay dedicated to the outfit, the separate garments in the outfit, and similar items pre-existing in the user's closet.
Here, the interface follows a similar style to other popular platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest, helping users skip the process of relearning a new platform's interface and interaction conventions. This includes the like/save button on the top right of the post, the dotted menu on the bottom right (including share options, reporting, liking, and following). The profile page's outfits and liked tabs follow a natural interaction pattern, swiping right or left to view each tab while as an indicator, the current page is highlighted in the middle.
User Closet
At a glance, the primary closet page gives users a general look into the items in their closet. Once tapped, the article of clothing is highlighted through an overlay. Here, users are able to view the item's properties and existing outfits that include the garment. In addition, the item's tags are able to be edited, improving the user's experience in the application (ie. the similar items in your closet feature). Details such as brand, item name, and category are noted with a red star, indicating to users that these tags are necessary and must be filled.
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Furthermore, users are able to customize their closets to their preferences with options to add and reconfigure the order of their closet categories (ie. tops, bottoms, and shoes) and specify a numerical limit to these categories. Doing so will promote decluttering and overconsumption with users' purchase habits. Users are also able to quickly sort through the items in their closet alphabetically, by date, size, and colour.
Add New Items (via Camera & Search) & New Outfits
Tapping the plus icon in the navigation bar triggers an overlay with three options to appear: adding a new item via camera, search or adding a new outfit. This feature is highlighted and placed in the centre of the navigation bar to imply that this will be one of the application's primary user features.
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Adding a new item via camera will trigger the device camera to open, allowing users the option to either snap a new picture right away or upload a pre-existing picture. Afterward, like the closet item interface, users are required to enter the red starred components while the other tags are optional. Users can type in the brand name, but a list of suggestions will help users fill in their information. Adding a new item via search will require users to fill in similar details, but instead to a results page. Here users will tap the items they would like to include in their closet.
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Adding a new outfit will take users back to their closet, but feature a similar interaction pattern as adding a new item via search. Users will tap the items they would like to include in their outfits and be taken to a confirmation screen. Here, an auto-generated graphic will be developed for the outfit, but users are given the option to upload their own picture to represent the outfit.
Explore & Search
Staying true to reusing the clothes one already has, the item and outfit cards in the explore and search pages include a section featuring items similar to ones already existing in the user's closet.
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The search bar includes a recently searched portion, to help users with their processes much quicker. Underneath is a series of buttons with recommended search tags, also intended to streamline the user's search processes. From the keyword search results, users are able to sort through their options alphabetically (by username), by colour, and by date. Here, users are welcomed with outfits and other user profiles as search results.
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If the user cannot find their intended search results, a new call to action is brought up, bringing users back to the search bar. This is done as a method of user feedback, and making the process seem more tailored to the user by asking a question.
Final Thoughts
This was a fun project to challenge myself with over the course of four weeks - I found myself learning many new things about UX research, empathizing with personas and creating a consistent design system across the interface. Prior to this project, I hadn't had the opportunity to exercise my UX skills on a solo project of this magnitude, so I was glad to continue and self-direct my learning this way. With this project, I feel as if I found a stronger passion for UX, being the first non-academic project I had completed. By working alone for the first time, I became aware of a variety of potential pitfalls that come from work without a team present such as sole responsibility, overworking, and personal bias.
As I didn't have a team to rely on this time, it was up to me to complete my deliverables and not cut any corners to ensure a steady workflow throughout the project. With this, I found that I would work late nights given the odd 4 A.M. burst of inspiration or to guarantee I can get all of my ideas out. Most importantly, I found personal bias to be a major issue as I didn't have anyone to challenge my decisions (ie. determining a solution to my original problem, choosing a colour palette, visual style, and features to add to this project). As a result, I focused a lot on my initial user interviews to get a sense of where the target audience may be and what their needs are.
In addition, I also found it challenging to offer a social aspect without making this application into an entirely new social media platform. To combat this, I had to figure out the fundamental needs of the audience and the features of a social media application that could meet these desires. With this, I ultimately decided that features such as private messaging and commenting would go against my goals to promote less clothing consumption. If I were able to do this project again, I would focus more on user-testing to better understand the gaps in my interaction features, design, and most importantly my perception of the user's primary needs. I would also focus more on researching existing UIs and what makes their designs able to meet the needs of their audience rather than copying the fundamentals of their design for the sake of aesthetics.
