Overview
As the sole designer on a team with 3 engineers, I led the end-to-end design of Styl, 'Tinder for Fashion' iOS app, which provides personalized clothing recommendations from over 25 top brands, including Zara, Urban Outfitters, and H&M. Styl aims to optimize the online shopping experience, and the app now has over 40,000 monthly active users, 100,000 downloads, and over 15 million swipes.
My role involved working closely with users to create wireframes and prototypes. I also developed a cohesive visual identity and design system for the app. Throughout the project, I led iterative QA testing, conducted extensive user research, and collaborated closely with developers to ensure the app met our design goals and user needs.
Research
In the fashion industry, the average fashion website gets 3 in every 100 recommendations correct. This is due to data scarcity and unary ratings, which ultimately results in a poor shopping experience.
The majority of e-commerce shopping occurs on computers because, traditionally, the experience of purchasing a product has been smoother on web-based interfaces. However, with the introduction of Apple Pay and one-click checkouts, an increasing number of purchases are being made on mobile apps.
The majority of large fashion apps are single-brand apps, where companies sell their own products only, such as the Nike app.
Interview Protocol
When designing the interview protocol, the objective was to understand the current shopping experience and identify online shopping habits, preferences, and expectations.
I prepared an interview script with over 25 open-ended questions focusing on participant shopping habits, motivations, and pain points, and interviewed over 26 users individually.
We focused on female-identifying students at Duke University due to proximity and this group's higher propensity for online shopping, making them a relevant initial user group.
Key Findings
Multi-Brand Shopping: While users express a desire to shop across various brands, there are notable frustrations associated with the multi-brand shopping experience.
Friction in Checkout: Users experience challenges or friction during the checkout process, including cumbersome checkout flow and disjointed checkouts.
Hick’s Law & Cognitive Load: Hick's Law suggests that as the number of choices increases, the time it takes for a person to make a decision also increases. This can lead to abandonment due to decision paralysis and increased cognitive load.
Persona-Based Onboarding: Our research indicates that a persona-based onboarding process, where users answer questions about their style and preferences, resonates well.
Sketches & Wireframes
We explored different ideas using sketches, wireframes, and storyboards. This helped us brainstorm and visualize initial ideas.
Iteration & Growth
From these concepts, I created clickable prototypes and shared them with our target users, gathering feedback and making updates as we moved forward.
We knew we wanted to start growing a user base as soon as possible, so I worked with the team to understand our technical limitations and identify key features to prioritize. This allowed us to streamline development and optimize both speed and efficiency.
Through this experience, I learned the importance of data-driven design choices and how to make tradeoffs between aesthetic elements and functional code. As a small team with tight deadlines, analyzing metrics related to user engagement and feature utilization became instrumental in allowing us to build the app as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Launching the app on the App Store and growing to 150K+ users and 25M+ swipes is something I’m super proud to say I helped accomplish.
Thank you for reading my case study!
Make sure to check out my other projects too!
