At the 2022 Patagonia x Adobe design challenge, my submission placed in the top 20. FairCloset is an app for fashion consumers who want to be more conscious about how their clothing is sourced and manufactured.
In 2022, I participated alongside Christine Pak in the Patagonia x Adobe Design Challenge. We placed among the top 20 submissions. The following case study details the process of designing FairCloset, and what went right and wrong along the way.
"Design a third-party mobile app that informs a consumer segment about brands who support living wages directly benefitting workers and their families. The solution must create a way to view measurable impact and/or progress." -Patagonia Creative Team
Fast fashion is a popular and exploitative business model based on replicating high-fashion designs and mass-producing them at low cost. Oftentimes, this entails exploiting workers in inhumane conditions. Apparel workers are among the lowest paid people in the world. Every worker should have the right to fair compensation and a living wage.
Our solution was FairCloset, an app for fashion consumers who want to be more conscious about how their clothing is sourced and manufactured. Below were marketing slides we developed to pair with our product:
We found success in this project because a bulk of our sprint was spent in the 0-to-1 phase of product development (breaking down and understanding our prompt). As creative thinkers, it was tempting to immediately jump into competitor research or early ideation and sketching. Committing to breaking down and understanding the prompt first, however, built a foundation for our sprint that helped us move smoothly through future design phases.
The design challenge was broad. To align on our impact goals, we broke down the prompt to 3 design problems we wanted to solve.
We wrote the following problem statement to guide our design sprint:
"How might we inform young consumers of fast fashion and encourage them to take action on current fair trade issues to demand better supply chain practices within the fashion industry?"
After breaking down our prompt and articulating a problem statement, we began brainstorming possible solutions. We pivoted from ideas quickly and frequently to consider as many solutions as possible.
After choosing the most viable features for our app, we created a foundation for our product and mapped out a user flow.
From our ideation phase we identified three core user experiences as our app's main features: Stories, Explore, and Your Closet. These became the different pages accessible via the app nav bar:
Stories: Users read articles on current events that are related to fair trade to learn more about ethical fashion and supply chain practices.
Explore: Users search fair trade ratings for specific brands and their factories.
Your Closet: Users keep track of the clothing they own and build up a fair trade score for their closet.
After deciding on our main features, we collectively sketched out multiple low fidelity designs. Afterwards, we used those sketches to make a Lo-Fi wireframe on Adobe Xd.
Before moving to high-fidelity prototyping, we asked friends around campus what they thought of our product. At the time, we were concerned that the user flow wasn't intuitive or linear. Looking back, we realized we should have given participants more context or the design prompt before asking for their opinions.
After uncovering user pain points in our Lo-Fi designs, we transitioned to high fidelity mock ups using Adobe Xd. The following are screens from our final submission.
Below are some key screens from our final submission. Go to process slides for link to final prototype and detailed descriptions on screens and design rational.
