Rent-A-Thread
Rent-A-Thread is an app to encourage more sustainable fashion consumption
by enabling consumer-to-consumer short term clothing rentals.
Deliverables
High Fidelity Prototype
User Personas
Low Fidelity Design
My Role
UX/UI Design
User Research
Journey Mapping
Project Context
8 weeks Winter 2020
UW DubHacks
Tools: Figma/Photoshop
The Goal
To enable users to rent top-tier clothing from community renters. As well as rent out their own clothes to make money, to encourage upcycling old clothes.
Research
Overview
This project is part of a DubHacks design challenge I participated in. Rent-A-Thread leverages my love of sneakers and app design all in one. As college students, my friends and I always want to have the latest trends in fashion, but don't want to pay premium markups. I have created the app and user design of Rent-A-Thread which enables users to get the clothing they want as an affordable rental.
User Research Interviews
I interviewed three individuals who were of different age groups and occupations. These people have commitments whether it's school related or work-related I wanted to have a wide userbase that interacts with different stages of the buying and selling process. Here are my findings:
Goals:
1. Have an app that is transparent everything needs to be upfront
2. Safety and both party assurance
3. Easy to use interface to track items
Pains:
1. Too many third-party seller apps have different focuses
2. Many different apps are bloated and information overload
Technology:
1. Enjoys shopping online and on a smartphone, likes how apps
allow users to create listings by snapping a picture.
User Journey Map
For my user journey map, I wanted to see how Ruby would act in a situation where she is setting up the app and is having issues with onboarding. I wanted to see how her thoughts and moods would shift during this time.
Requirements and Goals
Based on my interviews, personas, and user journey maps I came up with design requirements for my solution.
Requirements include:
- Helping users rent out and sell their clothing items
- Organize the items that they have and that is outstanding
- Be user-friendly and have fewer tabs
- Be completely non-contact
Design Goals include:
- Simple font, and layout so users are less intimidated to sell
- Have communities built into the app to help new sellers and people declutter by selling or renting out clothes.
Project Scoping
Research has shown that gig jobs and side hustles are becoming the new norm. Independent workers have now seen an uptick of 33% in 2020. While new, the gig economy is set to grow to 455 billion USD by 2023. By leveraging a gig economy, together with Rent-A-Thread, many users can lend out their clothes in a safe and non-contact manner which provides a piece of mind and much-needed safety to rival consumer-to-consumer apps.
As development started I decided to limit the project to a mobile-only app and clothing only. As I realized having a rental app would be very broad in its scope. Hence I narrowed it down to a mobile app design and clothing.
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Feasibility with timeframe
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Distinctly addresses users concerns
Focusing on the app experience I wanted to make this app unique from being another marketplace app.
My most important aspect of this app was to have an onboard forums page that allows users to join groups to get help with cleaning, caring, and working with their products. These forums are meant to educate users and allow them to connect with the app.
In my second iteration of the app, I divided the app into three categories:
1. Home - the landing point of the app this allows users to see everything such as cart, settings, notifications
2. Social - This is where the forums, messages, and interaction happen, users can leave reviews and communicate with each other here.
3. Selling - A marketplace-styled page for sellers, and renters to help organize their inventory, create listings and view analytics.
Design Requirements
Evaluation
In my feedback, I tested my low-fidelity prototype on college-aged students. This evaluation allowed me to see pain points and other inefficiencies in the design.
Based on the feedback I was able to make changes to my app accordingly:
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Changing the home page to show already recommended products based on user usage
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Have a search bar to find different groups that were not only nearby geographic location
High Fidelity Prototype
Below are my designs that showcase adding items to storefront management, purchasing, logging in, user reviews, buying items as well as messaging within the app. Here you can see the high-designed details of my app.
Reflection
Points of Growth 🌱
Rent-A-Thread gave me an opportunity to create an app that helps people have access to all brands of clothing. Allowing them to have a safe and no-contact method way of renting clothes and being delivered to their door. In this process, I learned the skills of implementing steps of the human-centered design process. I designed with Figma and got to put my research skills into practice.
Challenges 💪
The biggest issue I had to face was creating designs that were easy to follow and were different from being another shopping app. I also had challenges with providing myself with enough time to get interviews in before my design.
For Next Time 🤔
If allowed more time, I would spend more time designing more detailed interactions for the high-fidelity prototype and emphasizing the merchant aspect of this app. I want to spend more time on that use case but as a result of the quick turnaround for this app, I had to cut many ideas for the merchant interactions. I would also allow myself more time to study other apps that are marketplace apps to understand user flows and how people manage them as well. I am proud of this app as it is one of the first designer rental apps on the market. While similar apps exist, most are not geared toward clothing rentals. I believe that I was able to stretch my knowledge as a designer and entrepreneur with Rent-A-Thread.
Thank you for reading! 👋