InTheMirror
Overview
InTheMirror is an online shopping marketplace for fashion focused shoppers. By housing hundreds of brands under one roof, InTheMirror saves users the hassle of searching the web for the styles they’re after. InTheMirror suggests new items + brands next to longtime favorites, and the more the app is used, the better it becomes at suggesting items to match the user’s tastes. Paired with a single cart checkout, shipping + payment info memory, and more, InTheMirror is the ultimate fashion marketplace for all budgets.
Team
Taya Voronko, Mariel Ogurek, Esmé Ablaza
Role
User Researcher, UX/UI Designer
Timeline
6 weeks
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop
The Online Shopping Experience
Shoppers spend hours searching the web to find the styles they’re after resulting in wasted time and dissatisfied shoppers. How might we make it simpler for consumers to find what they’re shopping for online and be able to save products they’re interested in for later?
Understanding the Space
Online shopping is a multi-billion dollar business in the US, spanning every industry and market imaginable. In order to design in the online shopping space, we needed to first narrow our target to a specific market: the fashion industry. We further narrowed the space by focusing in on a demographic: fashion-focused women ages 16-35. From there we sought to understand users’ shopping habits and motivations: Why and how do users online shop?
Interviews
To better understand the space, we talked to frequent online shoppers within our target demographic. We asked users about their shopping habits, pain points in the online shopping process, and what they value most out of an online shopping platform.
“I’ll look at every option before I buy [an item] because I’m weighing out every website and brand.”
“Keeping many tabs open [of products] is not super efficient. Or it can slow down my computer, or it’s harder to find what I was comparing.”
“It’s nice to try and condense into one order so you don’t have to pay for different shipping.”
“I didn’t want to add all these clothing [brand] apps to my phone because it just seems like too much to start adding all of them.”
“If I’m too specific in what I’m looking for, it’s never there. It’s never available. It’s hard to find that exact thing.”
“Even if I don’t end up actually buying anything I still will add things to cart or put things on my wish list or favorites”
Key Takeaways
Convenience - Consumers have the option to shop in brick & mortar stores or online, but often prefer online because of the convenience and variety.
Device - Smartphones are the most popular device to shop on, outranking tablets and computers.
Platform: On their devices, users can shop the brand/store’s mobile app or their website. Users may download apps for a few favorite stores to avoid cluttering their phone and otherwise shop via an internet browser.
Availability: What a shopper is searching for may not be what’s available or they may not be able to find it.
Intent: When shopping, users may be actively searching for an item or just browsing.
Narrowing Focus
Because the users we spoke with prefer to shop on their phones, but don’t want to download multiple apps, we decided to build an online fashion marketplace mobile app that streamlines the online shopping experience.
Personas
We already narrowed our demographic to fashion-focused women ages 16-35, but that still leaves quite a bit of room for differentiation. To meet the needs of most users, we built up three personas, each with their own goals, budgets, habits, etc.
Journey Map
With our personas in mind, we dove into understanding the user journey from start to finish. We wanted to pay special attention to how the touchpoints, or lack thereof, affected the user’s emotions and pain points.
Competitor Analysis
We knew we wanted to build an online fashion marketplace, that is, a platform that hosts a large variety of brands and styles. We took a look at platforms that are in this space and/or influence how shoppers find new brands and items. An important detail is that we didn’t include department stores in our analysis. Department stores sites are usually paired with brick & mortar stores and their inventory is controlled by buyers, not by the sum of what’s available; we wanted to design outside of those limitations.
Key Opportunity Areas
Using the sum of our research, our team identified some key opportunity areas:
Variety - Offer a variety of brands and styles at different price points to meet the needs of a wide range of users.
Personalization - Offer users option to input sizes, color preferences, brands, etc. to personalize app recommendations.
Recommendation - The more a user shops/browses on the app, the smarter the app becomes at recommending them items/brands that match their tastes.
Single Checkout - Streamline checkout process to one cart in-app, eliminate need to check out multiple times/go to a brand’s website to complete process.
Favorites - Allow users to save favorites and sort into general folders for better item memory retention and purchase planning.
Notifications - Users set alerts for brands, items, key words to be notified of new-in and sales.
Search - Search feature includes brands, items, trends, and key words.
Design Direction
We wanted to combine the insights from the competitor analysis with those from our personas + journey map. The intersection of the two is our ideal design space.
Ideation
We started off with some rough solution sketches, brainstorming as many possible app features as we could. We paid special attention to the pages users would interact with most on a shopping app: the home, profile, item and checkout pages. Our goal was to make the page layout intuitive and familiar, but still personalize the content to each user.
Wireframes/Sketches
We narrowed down our top features to include moving forward and sketched them out in more detail. These pages are typical to most shopping apps, but are built to accommodate multiple brands and to adapt to the user’s tastes.
InTheMirror V1
From the sketches we developed our initial digital prototypes. We were still in the process of designing the home, favorites, checkout, etc. pages, and we presented users with multiple version to test which were the most intuitive. To test specific features, we asked users to complete certain tasks in the app including “add your sizes” and “check the tracking information for your Forever 21 order”. The user testing and feedback helped inform our next iteration.
*InTheMirror was originally called “Pas Nu”
User Feedback
“What's the difference between the home and explore pages?”
“I think my items would get lost in my favorites as I add more. I wish I could organize them more like on Pinterest.”
“I like the one cart checkout, but I would want the option to checkout everything in my cart at once or only some brands at a time. Sometimes I add things to my cart, but don’t end up buying them right away and I don’t want to lose them.”
“Is there a way to browse just shirts or shoes, etc.? A lot of times when I shop I like to sort by item to start of my search, and it’s not intuitive on this app.”
Takeaways
Favorites - Allow users to sort their favorites into user-created folders.
Checkout - Allow single brand or complete cart checkout.
Home Page - Incorporate general item categories, For You, Explore pages into Home page to create one central hub.
Visibility - Users found it difficult to see some pictures or read some text because of the size.
Discover - Make discover features like Suggested and For You more clear.
The Final Design
InTheMirror V2
The second iteration of InTheMirror was built off the user feedback and key takeaways from V1. We redesigned the Home page to include general categories and bring the user’s attention to the discover features, like For You and Suggested Shops. We prototyped the search feature to include search suggestions and made it easier for users to customize and organize their Favorites page.
Reflections
Within the context of this design challenge, we had a lot of freedom to design without “real-world” constraints. In reality, if we were to further design and bring InTheMirror to life, we would likely need to narrow our scope even further.
Variety: How much is too much? - One of InTheMirror’s selling points is that it hosts a wide range of price points. However, hosting so many brands may muddy the app’s focus, frustrate some customers, or simply be too much information for a single app/team to handle. Perhaps a marketplace focused on fast-fashion or sustainable brands exclusively would help narrow focus.
Logistics - Logistically, it may be impossible to place orders through the app if it would require InTheMirror to have a partnership with every brand it hosts. Still a single checkout could still be possible with a “drop-ship” method.
Data scraping - In order to constantly add and update items on the app, InTheMirror would have to constantly scrape data from the online retailers they host. This can be a time consuming process multiplied by the number of brands on the platform. And brands may purposely slow or block data scraping, preventing InTheMirror from updating information.
All that being said, users have become accustomed to more personalized suggestions across all their platforms. It’s reasonable to assume that as time goes on, they will expect the same from their shopping platforms, and InTheMirror is a way to meet that need.
