Client Overview
I’ve had a longstanding interest in environmental causes and the impact that my choices as a consumer have on the environment, and Eileen Fisher has a history of making deep, sincere efforts to improve the eco and ethical impact of their clothes’ production. Their work also interested me as part of a much more systemic problem: the fashion industry is second only to the oil industry in terms of the harm it inflicts on the planet.

The Final Prototype
Here’s the final mobile prototype our team produced. Keep reading to learn more about the research underlying our design decisions.

Design Challenges
According to our initial research, the company is contending with three important challenges that we wanted to address with our design: 1) an aging customer base 2) a disconnect on their website between the shopping experience and the brand/products’ environmental story and 3) a site overflowing with hard-to-navigate information about their environmental efforts.

Methods: Competitive Research - We focused on three types of competitors or comparable companies:

1) direct competitors that share a target audience, aesthetic, price point, etc. with Eileen Fisher;

2) award-winning or extremely well-reviewed e-commerce apps; and

3) companies with strong product storytelling, some with an environmental focus.

Finding: One of the tools we found the most useful was conducting a feature comparison of well-reviewed e-commerce apps. Based on how common a feature was across the apps we chose, we tried to deduce how valuable consumers found it and how technically feasible it was. The chart below illustrates some of the key features we looked at.

Feature: More than half of the apps we reviewed included an option to scan a barcode, but of the two that didn’t, one was e-commerce only so they had no physical locations, and the other was a platform for people to buy and sell clothes from other consumers. Based on that, our assumption is that scanning is something that presents low technical barriers for companies and holds some interest for consumers.

Method: Technology Research - After talking to four developers (one at Dropbox, one at Spring, the CTO of an e-commerce payments start-up, and a Lead Instructor at General Assembly) we learned what features were technologically feasible, and which APIs might make it easier to develop the features we had in mind.

Finding: One key piece of advice we got was that APIs that are being used by a larger community are more likely to be well maintained and have any bugs addressed quickly. The primary considerations were: how many app users do we expect during peak usage (e.g. during a sale, or the holiday season) and how quickly do the users need results need to appear before losing patience.

Feature: We chose to include barcode scanning as an option within search, so that we could accommodate the needs of in-store users, but with the understanding that most users wouldn’t be using the app in an Eileen Fisher store.

Method: Usability Testing - Using InVision to create an interactive prototype, tested the site with users to see where they were confused, what they enjoyed, and their overall impressions.

Finding: Putting our prototype in front of users validated the value add that Eileen Fisher’s environmental story could provide when properly packaged. One user said, “I see the tank top is $100, and that’s okay because the story [behind it] adds value to me,” and that sentiment was echoed by others.

Feature: Early in our design process, we planned on incorporating Eileen Fisher’s environmental story into the product pages. It wasn’t until we’d gone through our first round of usability testing that we had the idea to incorporate it into other stages of the process such as the order history and the checkout flow as you can see in the screenshots above.

For a more detailed look at the research and design of this project, take a look at my Medium post about it.