Elevated user satisfaction with the creation of a split payment option
(Diba, affordable brand for ethical fashion on a budget)
Introduction
It’s no secret that the fashion industry is one of the world’s most polluting industries. Lately, sustainable fashion has been gaining a lot of buzz and popularity, as global warming is on the rise and natural resources are on the decline.
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Diba is a sustainable fashion brand that is changing the face of apparel by producing clothes from natural materials, which it grows, dyes, finishes, and distributes solely within the internet.
About Diba
Ethic
Organic, recycled & sustainable materials, fair labour & wages, a take-back program powered by eco-friendly packaging & practices.
Product range
Adult apparel (Women’s apparel (more focus), men’s and diverse inclusion unisex.
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Price range
Providing affordable sustainable fashion based on user research output ($–$$)
Project brief
As a team, we were given eight weeks to design an online platform for Diba that introduces its products and provides less expensive sustainable fashion.
Duration
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Five weeks UX
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Three weeks UI
The team
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2X UX/UI designers
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2X UX researchers
Tools used
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Figma
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Sketch
My role
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UX/UI designer
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Project management
Objective
Connecting users' needs to the business goal.
As Diba is still in its very early stages of development, it needed to design an online digital platform that it could grow into within the next several years while meeting users' needs.
Design process
Moving from theory to the final digital product.
Each weekly design sprint consisted of 5 phases executed using design thinking methodology and a demo was presented to the stakeholder at the end of each sprint.
My responsibilities
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User Research
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Competitor & Data Analysis
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Visual Design
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Interaction Design & IA
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Storyboarding
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Wireframe & Prototyping
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Accessibility
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Testing & Iteration
01 DISCOVERY
Research goals
Creating the roadmap helped us bring up the main research questions.
Study setup
Prioritizing user research methods, planning research.
Survey
(25 Participants)
Potential End-Users (buyers) + environmentalists
Usability testing
(9 tests)
One-on-one virtual usability testing
Interviews
(8 User interviews)
Including 3 environmentalists
Card sorting
(3 Participants)
Identifying the user flow alongside IA
Competitive analysis
(9 competitors)
Understanding their strenght and weaknesses
Interviews We started with a team discussion to better understand business requirements, gather existing stakeholder knowledge, expectations and create consensus on plans and priorities for a product, its direction and key milestones.
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Finding potential users via sustainable fashion Facebook groups and subreddits.
Observing the users by uncovering valuable insights
Conducting user research to empathize with users and discover how to design a product that represents sustainable fashion.
Women are most likely to be end users
25 to 35 years old is the age range
Students make a half of the users
Low income is one of the characteristic
Affordable products are more popular
Which colour reminds you of sustainability?
Green
Which colour is eye-catching for you?
Yellow
What kind of design would you prefer?
Minimal
What kind of user interface do you prefer?
Accessible
Identifying the persona
Analyzing research data helped me create Chloe.
We took all our research and insights. Then I devised one user personas with accompanying user stories. Finally, Chloe guided us throughout our design sprint to ensure that we design for our users’ specific goals and needs.
So what's the problem?
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"Is it possible to split my purchase into a couple of payments?"
Tania, 27, environmentalist
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"Can you make sale offers?"
Tarah, 25, accounting student
Empathy map
Leveraging users' mental models to get into their minds and recognize what they really require!
Exploring pain points
Summarizing meaningful and actionable results.
Design challenges
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Identifying a solution to provide an affordable option to purchase sustainable apparel by considering business expenses.
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Aligning the objective of the business to users' needs.
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02 DEFINE
Regarding the outcome of our researches, we focused on eco-fashion users and environmentalists as the target users. The results of our surveys and interviews showed us that the target users valued four main features: affordability, transparency, credibility, quality, in sequence.
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After analyzing all of our research, I began to understand the project’s challenges. Then, I brought up some ideas to overcome these challenges regarding the research outcome, some of which were accepted after communicating with the team and the stakeholder.
Narrative storyboard
Representation of Chloe's thought | My travel to the user's thought & unfolding the requirements, shot by shot through data visualization.
Competitor analysis
Finding how competitors have solved the problem
03 DESIGN
Exploring ideas | developing the design’s solution
Developing a Chloe-centred design.
As we reached the design stage of our project, we began sketching low-fidelity wireframes on paper and later digitized them in Figma.
Tamga Designs
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Offering split payment for certain products (Afterpay)
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Providing discounts, and having clearance/sale sections
TOAD&CO
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Having a pretty extensive sale section for both men and women (From a price standpoint)
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Offering seasonal sales
TENTREE
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Providing sale sections (For financial inclusivity)
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Overall low prices by outdoor brand standards
Moodboard & UI design direction
I was inspired by Minimal, timeless, sustainable apparel & monochrome colours.
Our UI design direction led us to the style trend for Diba’s website. One aspect of the business goals was to seem elegant and modern with a fresh, timeless and classy vibe to resonate with our fashion-forward users. Therefore, we used lots of white space, greens, and yellow accents to emulate the brand’s high quality and sustainability-focused vision.
04 TEST
The best ideas rise to the top
Where the users taught me how to overcome my obstacles to IA design.
To know if a design is worthy, it must be tested. We tested our prototype on a total of 9 people. 5 of those people were fashion-forward environmentalists and 3 of them were eco-fashion designers.
Realizing the scope of the design challenge
Information architecture (IA) & user interface (UI) design of the landing and product page.
Final impact
Requesting participants to rate their experiences on the split payment flow, then refining usability.
Retrospective
Personal learnings
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Learned how to actively listen to stakeholders and understand their vision.
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Defined the UX design roadmap and leading a team of fellow designers highlights my skills as a user experience designer.
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My ability to convince the stakeholder to adjust business goals based on users’ needs.
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The stakeholder reviewed and approved the documentation and design for the split payment method.
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The project had to be broken down into different versions; its design process was completed in two months. However, the project is still in progress to development & not been published yet.