When I was a teenager, I remember watching the iconic 1995 cult classic, Clueless, and wishing I could have a magical tech closet like the one Cher had in the movie. Maybe then I wouldn't have to constantly be stressing about finding ways to style the clothes I owned. I could just press a couple buttons and POOF! The closet would generate a perfect outfit for the day!
When I discussed this with my classmates, it turned out that I wasn't the only one who'd seen the movie and fantasised about having Cher's closet. As we began to discuss our everything fashion, from our struggles as 20-something girls bombarded by TikTok hauls and the impact fast-fashion was having on the planet, we realised that there could be potential to use the superpowers of HCI and UI/UX design to create an app that just like Cher, would say "Ugh, as if!" to these negative habits that we as a society have started developing when it comes to fashion and identity.
Created for my Human Computer Interactions class at Northeastern University (SP24) under the mentorship of Professor Alexandra To.
Fashion has always been a large part of our daily lives, and an outlet for creativity. Today, fashion has evolved to become a far larger instrument for self-expression. Many individuals feel uplifted through the clothes they wear and enjoy developing a personal style as they grow. But, the clothing industry is made up of quickly changing trends and fast-fashion tendencies, thanks to the widespread influence of the Internet, and social-media. This promotes a culture of consumerism which contributes to large-scale problems like land pollution. In addition to this, many people struggle to pick an outfit, even when they have a closet full of clothes. This can lead to a feeling of confusion when it comes to their identity and may lead to insecurities which are further compounded by influencers and social media.
According to an Earth.Org article:
To help people develop a personal style, in a mindful way that encourages them to recycle their outfits by creating new combinations and styles, our interface will act as a Lookbook; helping people keep track of their closets and make those outfit decisions easier so that they can look and feel their best, while maintaining healthy consumer habits.
In an age of fast-fashion, Lookbook is a digital closet app that encourages you to be sustainable while being stylish! Find new ways to love old pieces, and be a part of a future where fashion doesn’t have to be wasteful.
We started by identifying our target audience which consisted of three key user groups:
This served as the foundation for developing three key personas for our app. We wanted to cast a wide net and create an app that catered to everyone, unbiased by age or identity.
To better understand our audience, we conducted various user interviews and researched what kinds of problems existed for our user groups. We also drew from our own personal experience as female college students in our 20s. This helped us establish a basic idea for our app, and we began to create a task analysis diagram.
Paper prototyping was an integral part of this UX process. We learn how to best represent the tasks and features that we wanted to eventually create and ended up using interesting ways to craft our prototypes (like using sticky notes for changing parts of the screen). The user-testing with these prototypes taught us a lot about user behavior and the importance of initial lo-fi prototyping with paper, before investing time in making the actual Figma app.
The user interviews and tests were thoroughly documented through notes and video footage (obtained after prior consent from participants). If you're interested in viewing our user-testing sessions in detail, check out some documentation here.
For the design of the Lookbook app, we decided to study design trends that were relevant to our target market: individuals who liked fashion, and wanted to use technology to help solve their fashion dilemmas. We decided to make an app that was colorful and fun, but also clean and simple. Pinterest was one of our biggest sources of inspiration, especially design features like cards and tabs.
We designed a design system and basic style guide for us to follow as we prototyped on Figma, and we also built a sitemap to help us keep track of the features and pages that we needed, in terms of infrastructure.
After multiple iterations of user-testing and heuristic evaluations, we designed a hi-fi prototype that encompassed four key features:
After thinking about our approach to this project, I do think we were successful in the implementation of our idea. If we had the opportunity to dig deeper into this topic, I think there is a lot of room for future development. Since the project was inspired by the problems that fast-fashion creates, I think adding more features to support environmentally-conscious shopping could be good, or having resources that help users understand how they can thrift, or donate the items in their closet that they haven’t worn/ browsed in the app for a while. This could also help users rediscover old favorites that they might have forgotten about.
