Creating a responsive website for a non-profit organization The
Clothing Club. The project included rebranding, designing and coding a
responsive solution that would increase awareness and digital presence
of the client.
The Clothing Club (TCC) is a non-profit, volunteer based organization
in Aarhus, which works as a clothing library, where for a set price,
its members can rent up to 3 pieces of clothing per month. They has
existed for 5 years, but they only means of communication with the
target audience were Instagram and Facebook posts. Recently, they
decided to rebrand their digital presence and invest in a website.
The initial goal of the website was to
promote The Clothing Club and sustainable fashion; give users
information about the collection,
events and the client;
encourage visitors to join them as members and/or volunteers as well as
provide a system to manage rentals for TCC’s members and volunteers.
Problem statement
We want to increase the awareness of The Clothing Club among their
potential customers and develop their digital presence.
Discover
Interviews
We wanted to understand how TCC’s members and potential customers feel
about the concept,
what are their reasons for joining and how would they
describe the organization’s aesthetic.
Additionally, TCC was discussing adding a catalogue on their website, so we wanted to learn the opinion of
the target audience about it.
The examples of questions were:
Why have you started using their service?
How would you describe their aesthetic/branding?
What do you think can be improved?
What might be a leaning argument for you to sign up? (for the potential customers)
Define
Target Audience Segmentation
Based on desk research and interview with our client we segmented our audience, to navigate their needs
better.
We decided that our main target group is going to be millennial
women,
living in Aarhus, who are open to thrift shopping
and at least one of their interests is:
saving money
living sustainably
fashion and experimenting with their style
However, TCC wants to expend in the future their offer to man and non-binary people. Therefore, it was
requested that the design
doesn’t appear too feminine, which could discourage their potential future customers.
User Persona
Based on desk research and the interviews we created 2 user personas:
Sarah Jakobsen - a Danish student, who wants to save money and the planet at the same time.
Anna Müller - an international member of The Clothing Club, who wants to become a bigger part of the
community, while learning new skills.
Both of them like to thrift and experiment with fashion. It helped us define our target group
better and always remember their needs.
How Might We
We formed How Might We questions to ideate on the potential
solutions for the problems our users might face while using the website.
First, we took our long-term and short-term goals for the solution from our previous research, in spirit
of:
Promoting sustainability
Attracting new members
Creating an open and supportive community
We voted for the most important and achievable outcomes
Later we took those challenges and we asked ourselves how might
we solve them.
That way we ended up with potential solutions to the problems.
Again, we voted for those that we thought were applicable to our users’ needs. As a result, we
gathered:
a lookbook
a reminder of the return date for rentals
good SEO words
highlighting events on the front page
2x2 Matrix
After the entire process of HMW we picked some ideas from it and put them into a 2x2 Matrix
to prioritize them by the impact on users and the effort
they require. That helped us decide which features we should work on and which ones we can postpone.
At that point, we decided not to pursue the catalogue with clothes and the back system to manage the
membership.
Instead, we prioritized making a lookbook and a front page
with an original design that will attract new members.
Develop
At that stage we started working on the visual part of the solution. Because of a short deadline,
we decided to design mobile version of the website first
- primarily to ensure that we will not overcomplicate the design
in a way that later would be hard to translate to other devices.
Low-fi Wireframes
First, we sketched using crazy
8 method to generate
many ideas in short amount of time. After voting on elements that we liked, we move on to Figma, to create
low fidelity wireframes
and focus on on the functionalities rather than the design.
At that stage we concentrated on following hierarchy rules and application of
the F scanning pattern to ease the users’ reading.
High-fi Wireframes
For the high fidelity we implemented the feedback from testing and
focused more on the UI of
the solution.
At this stage, not only we added colors and content such as photos and illustrations, but we also focused
more on design principles.
Testing
We tested the usability of the project in 2 testing sessions (low-fi and high-fi) on 10 people total,
by observing how users interact with it during guerilla tests and
think aloud tests.
We sumed-up the process and the results in the video.
Desktop Version
After implementing feedback on mobile high-fi, we created the desktop version of the webpage.
The biggest challenge we faced during desktop was the hero section
on the landing page.
We had trouble with the layout of "our values" section and we have also realised that the photo doesn’t
represent TCC’s message,
so we decided to change it to the one that show their values such as community.
Final Figma Prototype
After testing and finishing the desktop version, we needed to update the
mobile to the new design.
That way we finally reached our final prototype for both mobile and
desktop.
Click the button to view the Figma of it.
Reflection
The original project was too ambitious for our skills and time,
which we should've realized it sooner.
During the interviews we focused maybe too much on understanding the
client and
the target audience, but we neglected the problem and solution topic.
It’s hard to balance out bold and
creative
web design with usability and accessibility.
We should have checked the testing
tasks sooner -
the participants were confused by them at the start, which resulted in less valuable feedback.
Communicating with stakeholder is challenging,
mostly because of the fast pace of the project and how long we needed to wait for client’s response.