Easy-Fits
Having worked in menswear with past projects such as the PSLDN label and interned at Whistles’ Menswear design studio, I was looking for an opportunity to combine UX/UI design and fashion. My thought process centred around making an aspect of fashion easier to navigate.
With this in mind, I started thinking about the age old notion that men do not enjoy shopping for clothes (or at least, much less than women do).
An article from GQ magazine highlighted in 2016 that ‘Men Are Shopping More Like Women Than Ever Before’. Interviews with experts in the Wall Street Journal backed up the notion that ‘men are browsing, impulse buying, and experimenting with trends like never before’ (Gustashaw, 2016). Traffic on men’s fashion sites such as Mr Porter as well as studies conducted by the likes of Euromonitor also seem to back an upward trend in men’s shopping habits.
Despite the seemingly upward trend, Bronto’s 2015 Consumers Tell All survey showed that only 30% of men nationwide (US) reported shopping online. This indicated that there was still a large section of men out there who avoided online fashion shopping overall.
At this point, I wanted to understand what was being done to address this on the current market.
On The Market
At the high end, Mr Porter found a sweet spot between editorial content and a substantial offering of men’s apparel. ASOS had also been very successful in the low to mid range side of things with a similar set up. The design encouraged interaction with prompts and numerous points of contact.
Pivot
The more I looked into eCommerce fashion sites, the more I realised that my solution had to be different. The likes of Mr Porter and ASOS were clearly aimed at men who already had an interest in fashion. A dig into ASOS’ mission statement revealed that it targeted ‘the twenty-something fashion-lover: an avid consumer and communicator who is inspired by friends, celebrities and the media’. The phrase ‘preaching to the choir’ surfaced here.
At this point, it was clear that the audience I needed to target was who Australia’s largest independent men’s site described in 2019 as “men who can’t dress.” This ranged from the 25+ men who let their mum or partner shop for them, to ‘guys who think they dress well but really don’t’ (Booth, D’Marge, 2019).
This took the focus away from helping people shop, to helping people make better choices. As such, it was clear that styling would be the focus of this project. Style for the man who didn’t have any.
I then started looking into the styling services currently available. Trunk Club (US) and Stitchfix (UK) emerged as the two leading powers in this space. An attempt to download and explore Trunk Club as a user led to a dead end as they catered to the US market only.
Stitchfix was my way in. As I made my way through the app, I quickly realised how monotonous the process was. There was no stimulating animation and no track of progress. All the app presented was a never-ending white sheet with tons of questions. I took it upon myself to fix that.
Designing The App
My challenge with the new app was fitting in the functionality included in Stitchfix whilst minimising the bland monotonous aspect of it all.
This project marked my first foray into InVision. Up until this point, I had only experienced Sketch prototyping and I knew that I needed to develop my skills with another software. I needed inspiration. Luckily for me, Dribbe, Behance and UI Movement were only a click away.
Outcome
I designed and prototyped a personal styling app for men. The app comprises a style preference swiping system, a personal profile questionnaire, an in-app chat portal with a stylist and healthy sprinkling of machine learning.
The data allows the stylist to send a curated selection of apparel to the user’s address at mutually agreed intervals. The user only pays fir what they keep and sends back any unwanted items, free of charge.
With Easy-Fits, I built and improved upon features found on Stitchfix for a more comprehensive and assisted user experience.
I expanded the brand selection menu to include Mr Porter-esque brand editorials.
The outfit preference was also expanded into a swipe system to promote machine learning by teaching the app the users’ explicit dislikes and likes.
The colour selection menu was expanded to include a a direct line of dialogue with a personal stylist.
Below is a video demo of the the Easy-Fits prototype, created with InVision.