Anthro StyleBox. A personal stylist, on-demand, clothing service for the Anthropologie mobile app.
CHALLENGE
Anthropologie is a lifestyle clothing brand. I added a personal stylist, on-demand clothing service feature to their mobile app. I led the end-to-end UX/UI design for this conceptual project.
Role: UX/UI Designer
Skills: User research, UI/UX design, Prototyping, Usability testing.
Tools: Figma, Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop, Google Forms, Maze.
Team: Self-directed, with feedback from mentor and peers.
Duration: 2 weeks (80 hours)
RESEARCH
Understanding the Landscape
Anthropologie is an American clothing retailer operating more than 200 stores worldwide which offer an assortment of clothing, jewelry, home furniture, decoration, beauty, and gifts. Anthropologie is part of URBN brands, which includes Urban Outfitters, Free People, BHLDN and Terrain.
The objective was to leverage Anthropologie’s loyal user base and offer their AnthroPerks loyalty program members personal styling services for their product offering that is coupled with an on-demand subscription box service. This would be similar to the popular service offered by companies like Stitch Fix and Trunk Club. The Stitch Fix model sends their customers boxes of clothing and accessories according to their body type and style preferences, either at regular time intervals or on-demand.
I conducted market and competitive research to familiarize myself with the competitive landscape and understand best practices. Provisional personas were also crafted to equip the next phase of research.
Listening to the Users
I chose a survey as my main research methodology as I felt it would provide me with more quantitative data for this challenge.
The survey results provided great insights and confirmed the assumption that there was a demand for this service. 54.5% of participants said they would be interested in this service. The on demand model was strongly preferred over the subscription model.
DEFINE & IDEATE
Persona
The results of my research revealed there were several type of users with diverse needs. I synthesized the different insights and patterns and integrated them to form a primary persona.
Empathy Map
To provide further insights and gain a better understanding of Carmen. I did a deeper dive into her behaviors and attitudes.
Information Architecture
An integral part of the process is the information architecture to help users to navigate through complex sets of information effortlessly. My competitive research and learnings of industry best practices helped inform the initial heuristics and taxonomy assumptions for this app feature as it would be critical to the questionnaire-type format that is the focal point of the purchase journey. I developed a detailed IA of the user purchase journey.
Sketches & Wireframes
Building off the Information architecture, I began with screen sketches that increased to low-fidelity wireframes, keeping in mind that this needed to seamlessly fit the existing Anthropologie mobile app architecture’s look and feel.
Mobile App Wireframes
Usability Testing
Next I conducted usability testing on a low-fidelity prototype via Maze. My goal was to gather feedback on the overall architecture and to discover any friction that the user might experience throughout the process. I also asked some open-ended questions to gather overall impressions and comments.
DESIGN & REFINE
Branding Design
Using the Anthropologie branding as a guide, I developed a sub-brand for this feature called AnthroStyleBox. I leveraged their typography style, color palette and creative sensibilities to develop a logo mark that fits under the brand umbrella yet still has it’s own identity and sense of style. The logo mark was inspired by mid-century modern geometry and watercolor illustrations of the clothing items were sourced for the user interface that bring a creative, whimsical feel to the mobile app.
Brand Kit
The brand kit reinforces the existing Anthropologie brand and includes a full color palette, illustration and photography style recommendations and examples of icons, button treatments and other assets.
User Interface Design
With the branding and information architecture in place, the wireframes now comes to life with user interface design. The overall user interface was designed to be a seamless extension of the Anthropologie mobile app existing interface while still giving it a unique look under the Anthropologie brand umbrella.
High Fidelity Prototype Video
With the user interface design complete, I put together a high fidelity prototype video of the user journey.
Reflections
I enjoyed this project tremendously and it was one of my favorite case studies to work on during my Designlab UX Academy certification. It was an added challenge to build off the highly successful Anthropologie mobile app and be able to seamlessly incorporate a feature that adds value to the user. Based on the user research, there is definitely a market for this type of service in this format and to initially launch this offering to their loyal customer base offers users a great value as well as a market growth opportunity for the business.