Artistree
A mobile app for fashion creatives in the Seattle area to form a collaborative community and receive support.
Role
UX Researcher / Project Manager
Timeframe
18 weeks (part-time)
Methods
Surveys / Interviews
Usability Testing
Literature Review / Market Research
Problem Statement
How might beginner fashion creatives achieve the ability to form a local community so that they can receive support and learn new skills?
Research Approach
Literature Review/Market Research: I examined research papers and relevant evidence to inform our problem statement. Our team also looked at existing platforms for crafters and fashion creatives and noticed a gap in the market for localized community support.
Initial User Research: Before ideation, we sent out a survey and conducted 5 semi-structured interviews to gain more insight into the fashion community as well as the needs and pain points of our target audience.
Affinity Map: After the initial research, I sorted our insights into five themes: features to consider for our product, social connections, barriers people experience, background information on the fashion industry, and skill learning. Some notable insights we gained were:
People of color have more barriers to entering the fashion industry
Working in the fashion industry can feel isolating and it is difficult to people nearby with similar crafting interests
It is hard to find people with advanced skills who are willing teach/help others
Persona
From the preliminary research, I developed our main persona, Stella, a beginner fashion creative:
User Testing
We conducted a round of user testing for each iteration of the prototype.
For the low-fidelity prototype, we validated our concepts with our target users by conducting informal user interviews.
For each high-fidelity prototype iteration, I conducted task-based usability tests through UserTesting with 12 users. To do this, I designed and wrote screening questions and a test plan with tasks and short-answer questions for users to answer.
The main concepts we wanted to validate were the support vs. community feeds, the portfolio feature, collaboration posts, and the events page.
From these tests, I synthesized the results and captured the observations, positive feedback, pain points, opportunities, and notable quotes on sticky notes in Miro. This informed our ideas for improving the prototype.
Final Evaluation Findings
Users understood the difference between the support and community feeds.
Users said that they would use the portfolio feature to showcase their finished projects.
Users would attend events if they were given more information and would be open to collaborating with other users but were confused about the open to collaborate icon.
As such, our design direction was to add more onboarding so that users understand how collaborations work as well as the hyperlocality aspect of the platform. We would also add more event details so that users will be more willing to attend events hosted on the platform.
Reflection and Learnings
This was the first project that I completed from ideation to prototype delivery. Some of the key lessons I learned were:
Collaboration and Communication: Since this project spanned 5 months, our team needed to have clear and regular communication with one another. As the project manager, I was in the best position to ensure that our team operated with effective pacing and collaboration. I did this by organizing and overseeing weekly progress check-ins and several synchronous collaborative work times.
Prototype Iteration: This project taught me the importance of testing multiple iterations of the prototype. It was very fulfilling to watch the usability test videos and observe when users could easily complete tasks, and see how much progress we made with every design iteration.