picThrift Case Study
By: Laura Muñoz
Tags: Design Thinking, Prototyping, Ideation, Design, Design Process

Our four-day process to design picThift, which makes it easy to find a second-hand, zero-impact alternative to the clothing item you’re seeking.

Late September arrived, and I eagerly diverted my mind from the COVID-19 public health crisis to dive into the (remote) kickoff week of the UW MHCI+D program: Immersion Studio.

Here’s the story of how we designed picThrift in just four days.

The Design Challenge

“…new challenges have arisen that require a shift in thinking from traditional design practices that focus on human wellbeing, to more inclusive practices that emphasize a multiplicity of perspectives.” (Smith et al., 2017).

We were placed into teams of three and tasked with the challenge of designing with a post-humanistic lens for harmonious cohabitation between human and non-human agents.

Project Aspects

Research, ideation, design, prototyping, testing

Duration

4 days

Team

Formative Research

In exploring post-humanism and harmonious cohabitation, we sought to approach the earth, its inhabitants, and its matter as a whole, interconnected system. A quick brainstorm and voting session led us to explore consumer industries that cause environmental damage, affecting humans, non-humans and earth systems. Ryan had recently learned that the fashion industry is the second most polluting industry in the world.

As designers, we would be making decisions on behalf of others, so in our limited timeframe, we wanted to learn and understand as much as possible about our domain and the needs and perspectives of our stakeholders.

Secondary Research

We conducted literature reviews and product research to gather information about the following topics:

The negative impacts of the fashion industry on the environment, including humans and nonhumans

Subcultures, markets and products that address these negative impacts via reducing clothing consumption, second-hand clothing, and sustainable manufacturing

Barriers to humans lowering their clothing consumption impact

Primary Research

We conducted 3 semi-structured interviews with individuals between the ages of 22–64 in order to understand their clothing shopping habits, their motivations and experiences with buying new vs. used or sustainably-made clothing, and their barriers to making sustainable clothing choices.

Research Insights

We captured our research through note-taking and recording, which would later help us in the synthesis and sense-making process. We shared and discussed the data we each collected, then organized our secondary and primary research data using affinity clusters. The following insights emerged:

A snapshot of our research insights and contributing factors from our Miro board.

The fast fashion industry has a strong negative impact on human and non-human agents due to high environmental impact (i.e. pollution) and other factors, such as labor exploitation. Markets for sustainable shopping exist, and common motivators for participating are caring about sustainability/impact, lower prices, vintage fashion, community, and trends. There are existing communities and players in the second-hand and sustainable fashion market, indicating a growing cultural interest. There are several perceived barriers to sustainable shopping.

Based on these insights, we developed a “How Might We” statement to help guide us forward in the design process:

Ideation

Method: Sketching, the braiding method

We used an ideation method called braiding to generate and discuss ideas with our problem space in mind.

2 minutes to sketch

1 minute per person to share

10 iterations

30 sketches total

Concept Affinity and Down-Selection

Our 31 ideas in Miro, down-selected to 4 favorite concepts (one of which incorporates multiple ideas).

After sharing our 30 drawings from the braiding method via Zoom, we wrote them on sticky notes in Miro, added another, and down-selected to four main concepts by each voting for our two favorites.

Concept Suite

We refined, re-sketched, and wrote a short description of each concept, taking into consideration how they could benefit human and nonhuman stakeholders.

Sketches from our concept suite.

Further Down-Selection

We met with two other teams to share our concepts and solicit feedback, then proceeded to further down-select by ranking each concept on a scale of 1–5 (exciting, relevance, achievable). All three team members gave the highest cumulative score to Concept 1: ThriftFinder, which we later renamed picThrift.

Down-selection process, ranked by (exciting, relevant, achievable).

Design Response

Moving forward with picThrift required another round of critique and iteration. After incorporating some feedback we received from other teams, we refined our concept to the following:

picThrift is a tool that enables you to upload a photo of a desired clothing item. Using your specified criteria (e.g. size, price), it scans for lookalike, second-hand items online and surfaces the top matches for your direct purchase. Within days, carbon-neutral delivery puts the zero-impact item into your hands.

picThrift aligns with the design challenge by lowering the impact of clothing consumption to zero via reuse and carbon neutral shipping. Reuse averts the creation (due to demand) of an additional clothing item. A second-hand clothing purchase avoids many of the negative impacts of the fast fashion industry, including:

Additional pollution, causing health problems for living beings

Additional burning of fossil fuels, leading to climate change, pollution, ecosystem harm due to fracking and drilling, and other harms

Exploitation of laborers who make the clothes under inhumane conditions

Synthetic, non-biodegradable clothing in landfills and oceans

Stakeholders

Our target audience includes consumers who fit any of the following criteria:

Want to buy second-hand to reduce their clothing consumption impact, save money, give old clothing a new life, and/or follow a second-hand trend

Don’t want to spend time and effort sifting through thrift racks or online thrift products

Know what style of item they’re looking for (maybe they saw a picture of a shirt they liked), and want to find a second-hand version

Other stakeholders include current and future human and non-human actors who are negatively impacted by the production of new clothing. We can even consider the second-hand clothing items themselves to be stakeholders — it feels joyous to give an old, forgotten clothing item in the back of someones’ closet a new, appreciated “life!”

Prototyping

Now it was time to test picThrift in action through prototyping.

We approached prototyping as a set of hypotheses that we needed to test. We aimed to answer the following questions about our design response:

Concept

Would someone in our target audience want to find a second-hand alternative to a desired clothing item?

Would the user want to use a tool like picThrift to accomplish this goal?

Execution

What steps does a user need to take to accomplish the task of buying a second-hand alternative to a desired clothing item they found online?

What information do they need to feel confident enough to make the second-hand purchase?

Is the user able to use the digital prototype and achieve their goal?

Does it meet their expectations?

What we created

User journey

We crafted a user journey to create a realistic scenario in which a person would use picThrift. This helped to guide our app prototype, and we were also able to use parts of this story to set the scene for our prototype testers.

Information architecture

Each team member diagrammed a plausible information architecture for the picThrift mobile application, then we combined our favorite elements of the three into one cohesive and comprehensive flow.

Digital prototype of mobile application

We created a digital prototype of the picThrift mobile application in Figma, dividing up the screens and then refining them together to ensure consistency.

Some screens from our digital prototype in Figma: Create a profile, take or upload a photo, find your matches, and buy the second-hand alternative instantly.

Testing

We recruited two participants that were available on short notice to test our prototype via Zoom. We gave them the following scenario and asked them to complete two tasks, describing their thought process and reactions as we watched their actions via screen-share:

Scenario

You need to buy clothes for your upcoming job interview. As a college student, you want to find clothes that are both affordable and sustainable. You’re tired and overloaded with homework so you don’t want to spend much time. You decide to use picThrift to help you with your shopping process.

User tasks

1. Add a photo of a clothing piece you want (we gave them a photo of a dark blue blouse worn by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the prototype).

2. Purchase the first dark blue blouse.

After the participants completed the tasks, we asked them a series of follow-up questions.

Prototype testing insights

One of our prototype testers revealed in the follow-up questions that he does not buy clothes online, and therefore would not use the app. This was a good reminder to us that it’s best to screen potential participants beforehand to make sure they meet certain criteria to match the target audience— in this case, that they are open to purchasing clothing online, and are open to buying second-hand clothing.

Participants were confused upon entering the app, expecting more guidance and clothing-related content. Aside from that, they were able to navigate through the app to achieve their goal of adding a photo of a clothing piece and ultimately “purchasing” a second-hand version. Participants did not know of other products that performed the same function. The participant who shops online liked the picThrift concept and expressed interest in using it. Both participants gave useful feedback about additional features they would be excited to see.

Reflection

Future work

There’s a lot we could do to improve picThrift if we had more time. Here are a few items I would suggest we do moving forward:

Develop and use a screener for recruiting participants for research interviews and prototype tests.

for recruiting participants for research interviews and prototype tests. Interview more stakeholders during the research phase, and interview stakeholders in other related domains (e.g. pollution experts, thrift store workers, etc.).

during the research phase, and interview stakeholders in other related domains (e.g. pollution experts, thrift store workers, etc.). Incorporate product feedback and do more testing and iterating of the prototype (with participants who are screened to be part of the target audience).

(with participants who are screened to be part of the target audience). Consider how picThrift would pull clothing match results from online, second-hand vendors.

from online, second-hand vendors. Create an onboarding flow to give more information to users who are new to using picThrift.

Key Takeaways