When starting the Needfinding process, we were hoping to learn more about how values around sustainability influence people’s shopping choices. We spoke to two people who do most of the shopping for their households and two people who recently graduated from college.
We noticed a dynamic in two of the interviews that intrigued us: the internal conflict experienced by parents who want their children to make sustainable choices, but are hesitant to discourage them from buying what they want to. After creating empathy maps and synthesizing our insights, we decided to follow this thread further.
At this stage, we interviewed three more individuals with the general theme of family relationships and values around sustainability. We also wanted to speak with people our age who are passionate about making the clothing industry and consumer choices more sustainable.
With our interview findings, we developed “How Might We...” (HMW) statements. We tested the assumptions in these statements in three different ways with 10 new users. What we learned from these experiential prototypes helped us consolidate our ideas for what our solution would be.
We produced this concept video to illustrate how our chosen solution works. We detail more of the behind the scenes for how we developed our video in the presentation.
With our concept video completed, we now had a broad sense of how our solution would address the problem of impulsive choices and pressure on consumers to participate in the fast fashion industry. We rapidly sketched several different interfaces that would contain our solution. They were really all over the map, from a smart washing machine that tracks clothing use and gives tips, to a voice assistant that helps you make the best use of your closet and make sound shopping decisions.
We ultimately reached a consensus around pursuing a browser extension that intervenes in the shopping experience as our solution. We detail the rationale behind this choice in our presentation and in-depth report. We made a low-fidelity prototype of a Chrome extension on Balsamiq, a basic online wireframing tool, to test with three different users.
We produced this concept video to illustrate how our chosen solution works. We detail more of the behind the scenes for how we developed our video in the presentation.
Four of our classmates individually tested and evaluated our prototype for violations of Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics for interface design. They came together to create a consolidated report of the violations and suggestions for how to address them. This report was extremely helpful for the next iteration of our prototype.