Cloud Closet

A cloud closet for college campuses. Exploring the circular economy around fashion by reducing psychological bias and building trust.

Overview

About the Project

Abstract: Inspired from a design sprint led by UX Designers at Google, Airbnb, and Robinhood, our project is aimed at designing for trust around sharing clothes with strangers and creating space for college students to trade clothes. We worked closely with Barnard College's Buy/Sell/Trade Facebook Page, a college campus clothes sharing community of 7.2k members.

Team: Ji Yeon Kwon, Ismael Barry, Kareem Abukhadra, Sharon Jia, Matthew Maker, Rachel Lau

Timeline: 3-week design sprint held by Columbia’s UX Design Lab. November 2019 - December 2019.

My Role: User Research, Product Manager, Design Strategy

Problem Space

Many clothes are left unworn in people’s closets. Our team saw these idle clothes as an opportunity space.

A study with 18,000 people in 20 countries found that most people do not wear 50% of their wardrobe. Even worse, 80% of the clothes in a woman's closet are only worn three times or less. Despite the staggering amount of unworn clothes, people still feel they have no clothes to wear and are constantly looking for new clothes. As a result, many people buy into “fast fashion” brands such as H&M and Forever 21, which fulfill their desire for cheap and trendy new clothes. However, such mindless consumption leads to detrimental effects on the environment. This also means the clothes they do not wear only end up getting pushed further back in their closet, taking up more room and space.

Solution

CLO uses the untapped opportunity space of idle clothes to recapture the magic of shopping and receiving new clothes, ultimately providing a sustainable alternative to fast fashion.

CLO is a platform that creates a shared, circular economy around fashion on college campuses by helping users swap out the idle and unworn clothes in their closet for new clothes. Inspired by dating apps, CLO creates “matches” between people looking to swap their idle clothes, benefiting both parties by taking one’s untapped clothing, and reframing them as exciting, new clothes for others. Our app provides a more sustainable alternative to fast fashion by creating a shared economy around fashion while simultaneously satisfying our desire for the cheap, new clothes.

PROCESS

Phase 1: Understanding

Since Airbnb changed our perception of staying in a stranger’s home and UBER/Lyft changed our perception of riding in a car with strangers, we were curious to understand why there was no company that has been able to create a shared economy for clothes in the same way. We began by conducting secondary research on 20 startups exploring the sphere of selling, renting, and buying clothes, and analyzing the successes and failures of each company. After our contextual research, we wanted to go straight to our users to understand their pain points surrounding clothing exchange.

User Research

To gain a better understanding of the pain points surrounding sharing clothes, we conducted 30+ in-person and on-call user interviews, which gave us insights on the motivations, pain points, and successes of the current clothes exchange experience on college campuses. 

30+ User Interviews, Affinity Diagraming, Pain Point Identification

From our user interviews, we identified and group together insights from our research using post-it notes to produce 3 key pain points to address in our design solutions.

We conducted qualitative user research with the campus clothes sharing community of 7.2k+ members to discover friction and pain points. We wanted to understand when and how people on campus were willing to share or trade clothes on campus. We recorded the motivations, pain-points, and successes of their experiences onto post it notes, using affinity diagraming to group together similar concepts. From these groupings, we identified 3 key pain points in the current system:

1. Flakiness: Buyers and sellers did not show up to their set appointments.

2. Unresponsiveness: Buyers and sellers were slow at replying to messages, or did not respond at all.

3. Miscommunication: There was miscommunication over which items were already sold.

Phase 2: Designing (Fast and Failing Forward)

To address these pain points, each team member rapidly prototyped eight design solutions using the Crazy 8’s method from Google’s Design Sprints. We spent a week iterating through and delivering the design solutions we decided on to address these 3 pain points. Some iterations of testing our idea included posting a standardized post for selling and buying, and publishing a set of community guidelines. Our users reported that these standardized methods helped with the flakiness and unresponsiveness in the group. At the end of the week, however, we realized our focus had shifted from the original problem we wanted to address.

Rapid Prototyping: Community Guidelines

I became the moderator of the Facebook Clothes Sharing Community and drafted a series of community guidelines that addressed the 3 pain points we identified: flakiness, unresponsiveness, and miscommunication.

Phase 3: Pivoting

We realized from more user interviews that although it was frustrating that people were flaky and unresponsive, the overall process of buying and selling worked at Barnard and Columbia. By focusing the issues in the group, our team lost sight of the larger problem we were trying to solve, and narrowed our scope down so much that we were no longer solving a real problem. 

We realized we weren’t solving a real problem.

After this realization, we took a step back, and re-evaluated our users’ problems from a wider perspective. We shifted from trying to focus on improving the Columbia Buy Sell Group to the larger problem we were interested in: making use of the opportunity in idle, unworn clothes by creating a shared, circular economy around fashion. After re-evaluating the program, we generated a series of HMW questions to figure out how we could implement our design solutions.

• How might we recapture the magic of shopping, new clothes, and fast fashion while making use of idle clothes?

• How might we create a compelling shopping experience around sharing clothes using the compelling aspects of fast fashion?

• How might we reframe these idle clothes as new, exciting items for other people?

How might we recapture the magic of shopping, new clothes, and fast fashion while making use of idle clothes?

After reframing our problem using HMW questions, we revisited our interview with the founder of the Barnard Buy Sell group Tiana Saute, who gave us some key insights on why the Facebook group so successful to keep in mind while devising our design solutions:

• The group works because it is a trusted community on a college campus. “There is inherent trust because we belong to the same university”

• The group works because of the physical proximity. “The convenience is that people are down the hall, so they are more willing to do it.”

• The group works because it’s simple. “All these apps try to make things more complex, but the facebook group works because it’s easy and simple.”

With the framework of these HMW questions and insights, our team diverged and each came up with several design solutions for the problem using the Crazy 8’s method. All of our solutions kept in mind the key points Tiana noted: a simple solution, close proximity, and a trusted community.

We ultimately decided on two design solutions: (1) an offline and (2) an online clothes swapping experience.

Phase 4: Designing (Again)

We first chose to focus on designing a more short-term offline experience as a prototype in itself to help inform our long-term, online prototype. We each proposed several ideas and did a walk through with role-playing to simulate how the offline swapping experience would work, which helped us identify problems that we would’ve encountered during the event.

Offline Prototype

We first designed an offline experience for swapping clothes to explore how a shared economy around fashion would work in person.

Offline Prototyping, Role Playing, Observation, A/B Testing

We prototyped an offline clothes swapping experience with 6 users to gain insight into how a circular economy around fashion would work, which ultimately helped us design our digital experience.

Reflection

Our event concluded with a 100% swapping rate, allowing all six of our users at the event to walk out with a new item. During the event, we created “matches” between users’ clothes, which informed our decision to devise a “matching,” Tinder-like app for our digital clothes swapping experience. Furthermore, we used A/B testing and prototyped two experiences during the event that would inform a fundamental design decision for our app: should we show users all the options their options to swap with before matching, or just match them with the first person who also wants to swap with them? From our offline experience, we found that everyone was very satisfied with their first “match,” and did not need to be shown all their matches. We also wanted to keep the trust and proximity of a college community, so we devised CLO: an app that provides a seamless, clothes swapping experience on college campuses, inspired by dating apps by creating “matches” between users’ idle clothes. We immediately started iterating through wireframes on paper to see if our design solution would be intuitive for our users.

Paper Prototype Ver. 1

Reflection

After our first iteration, we did an initial round of think aloud testing with our users to gain a high level understanding of what ideas and interfaces the users found intuitive. We also conducted A/B testing to determine whether the user should be able to see all their matches before swapping, or just swap with their first match. Just as with our offline prototype, we found that users wanted to swap with their first match. Furthermore, users wanted to be able to buy items if they really liked them, so for our next iteration, we added the option of a super like, so that users can offer a price to buy an item rather than swap. We continued to prototype on paper to quickly iterate on our ideas and get more feedback from users. For our second iteration, since all the fundamental features were decided, we went into greater depth on the specific interfaces of our application.

Paper Prototype Ver.2

Reflection

After our second iteration, we conducted a second round of user interviews with 5 different users to determine what features were intuitive, and if they would like to see other features. We conducted contextual think aloud testing to see exactly how their minds walk through our interface, to see if that aligned with our own assumptions. We found that users found the idea very intuitive, and were consistently drawn to the (1) calendar feature and (2) super like function, both design decisions based on previous user interviews. With lots of positive feedback, we decided to scale up to digital prototypes on our third iteration so we could present our users a more realistic interface to test.

Contextual Think Aloud, Walk Throughs, Observation, 5 Users

We conducted more user interviews to understand what ideas and interfaces our users found intuitive, and to see if there were other features they would like to see.

Digital Prototype

Reflection

In our third and final round of user testing, we used exported our high-fidelity Figma prototype to Marvel to allow our users to have a realistic walk through of our application. Our 10 final users were a mix of both expert users who had critiqued our app, and users who had never been exposed to it before. There were some critiques about adding more or less social media involvement, and the specific preferences/filters that were chosen. Overall, however, we received lots of positive feedback from all our users, and found that many wished they had thought of such a simple, intuitive solution. One user even commented “of course!” after we explained our design solution to her. We ultimately saw the success of a user-driven design process in our final round of usability testing.

All our participants gave positive feedback on the overall concept, the intuitive design, and visual aesthetics of CLO, demonstrating the success of our user-driven design process.

Interactive Figma Prototyping, Contextual Walk Throughs, Observations with 10 Users

In our final round of user testing, all our participants gave positive feedback on the overall concept, the intuitive design, and visual aesthetics of CLO, demonstrating the success of our human-centered design process.

Final Design

CLO was built to use the untapped, opportunity space of idle clothes to create a circular economy around fashion on college campuses by using a matching procedure inspired by dating apps. We've used Figma to demonstrate the interactive flow of the key features of our application.

Lessons & Reflection

1. Design is about the process, rather than coming up with the quickest solution. Rather than rushing to a digital solution, my mentors taught me to continuously go back to the users and sit with a problem. That’s how we came up with an offline experience, after all.

2. Find a problem you are passionate about. Since I was very passionate about the circular economy of fashion and saw a massive untapped opportunity in the space of idle clothes, I found myself being more engaged throughout the user-centered design process.

3. Seek to understand your users. I learned to not make assumptions in order to receive real feedback from your users, and to always validate any hypotheses you may have using different types of testing.

4. Listen. Listen as much as you talk. Listen to understand, rather than confirm. Listen to seek to understand your users’ experiences, pain points, and perspectives. And listen to be grateful for negative or conflicting feedback for the opportunity to dive deeper into a complex subject.