The fast fashion industry makes up 10% of the world’s annual carbon emissions and contributes to the 85% of textiles that end up in landfills or are burned.
Problem
Over the years, the impact of fast fashion industry on this Earth has become increasingly obvious and dire. At first, fast fashion was an uncommon term as sourcing material such as leather or wool was the only way to produce clothing. Slowly, factories came into play as well as cheaper, less durable materials. These two ingredients led to a dramatic rise in fast fashion – a phenomenon that is now currently ruining our Earth. Sadly, sustainable shopping is horribly undervalued and unexplored as the increased accessibility of online shopping oftentimes leads to consumers prioritizing fast fashion. The inexpensive appeal of fast fashion causes people to purchase clothing more frequently and in high quantities at a time. There are consequently large amounts of fashion waste because people are buying in excess and throwing away clothing when they grow bored of it.
Our focus is to raise awareness surrounding the environmental impacts of the fast fashion industry while also offering alternative solutions to encourage people to change their bad shopping habits.
Brainstorming
When brainstorming ideas on how to solve this problem, our team first looked to existing solutions.
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Brand campaigns. Fast fashion brand H&M launched its Bring It campaign in 2013 to raise awareness on the importance of garment recycling by encouraging customers to donate unwanted clothes. But considering H&M's business model-- high volumes of trendy clothing at inexpensive prices-- their attempt to "close the loop on fashion" is ironic.
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Educational videos. While videos about sustainability can inform people about the general negative impacts of the fast fashion industry, they don't go into the specifics of individual clothing brands or articles of clothing.
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Websites with sustainability ratings. GoodOnYou provides information on the implications of various clothing brands with an easy-to-understand score. But while their explanations are very insightful, the website format requires users to inconveniently switch tabs while shopping.
After considering the existing solutions, we decided to craft our design approach into a three step process:
1. Informing users about the negative impacts of fast fashion brands
- Represented by concise, significant data collected from multiple sources
2. Providing more eco-friendly alternatives
- By giving personalized suggestions of sustainable clothing brands similar to what the user is shopping for
3. Encouraging users to shop more sustainably in the future
- With the option of saving clothing and brands to refer back to later and/or an additional resources page
Low Fidelity Prototypes
Based on our design approach, we created two low fidelity prototypes to present to our representative users.​
1. Phone application
2. Web extension
Both prototypes have very similar screens. However, the difference between them was the type of platform they were hosted on and the addition of a resources page in the phone application prototype.
After conducting two interviews with representative users experienced in the field of fashion and online shopping, we narrowed down some features that we took into consideration for our high fidelity prototype:
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A phone application was not the best solution as it would require the user to manually put in links of clothing (too many steps and would cause fatigue) and many people would most likely forget that they have it installed while they are online shopping. A web extension is the best option because it eliminates the extra step by being automated.
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Having an eye-catching notification will immediately educate the user on the sustainability of the clothing they are browsing and will prompt them to reconsider their shopping decision.
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Adding organization folders for users to sort their favorites so that they have access to it later and a page that links to additional sustainability resources would be helpful.
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Ensuring we provide ethical options that are affordable, with an attempt at staying in the price range that the user was originally shopping at.
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We improved our initial prototype by incorporating the above suggestions and created our second and final low fidelity prototype.
Garb Em Green is a web browser extension that raises awareness about the negative effects of fast fashion while also offering alternative clothing solutions, which happens simultaneously as the user is shopping
User Testing
After finalizing our low-fidelity prototype, we used Figma to transform it into a medium- to high-fidelity prototype. We presented this prototype to representative users to get their feedback. During the interviews, we were able to sit down and talk through our design solution, which helped us capture user thoughts, behaviors, and reactions.
In total, we conducted 11 interviews with representative users who fell into either three categories of our target audience:
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People who shop online and purchase fast fashion on a regular basis
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People informed and interested in fashion who also have experience in design and a good understanding of UX
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People who are interested or knowledgeable in sustainable fashion (sustainable brands, thrifting/second-hand shopping, sewing/crochet, etc.)
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Between usability tests, we continuously made improvements to our prototype design and asked for new feedback. Overall, most participants found that our prototype did an excellent job of raising awareness about their fashion choices and promoting sustainability. They thought the design was a great approach to the problem by directly informing the user when they are shopping online. Further, the quick statistics coupled with visualizations within the “Carbon Score Report” page of our extension keeps users engaged once they click on the pop-up. However, some common drawbacks to our extension frequently mentioned within our interviews included our extension theme being more fitted to mobile use (such as the “roundness” throughout screens and the color palette). Further, the icons used for navigation were confusing for users because they were not labeled. There were also suggestions of adding filters such as brand, price, and similarity in style for our alternatives page. Finally, because of conflicting opinions between the participants, we decided to omit the resources pages because it would lead to information overload. Learn more about our interview findings here.
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After reflecting on our interview notes, we refined our high fidelity prototype to include:
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Additional screen for Favorites page for users to sort their saved clothing items
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Adding filters (brand, price, style) to the Alternatives page
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Screens that allow users to create a profile so that they can save their data and access it through different devices
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Overall aesthetic changes to tabs, graphics, and layouts to make our application more readable and cohesive
Final UI Walkthrough
Extension Pop-up
When shoppers are browsing a clothing item from a fast fashion website, Garb Em Green will search the Internet to find similar garments from sustainable brands and notify users that there are better alternatives. We wanted the pop-up to be simple and eye-catching, which is why we emphasized the sustainability rating to draw user attention. Expanding the notification tab will prompt the Score Report page.
Score Report
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The Score Report page informs the user on the impacts of the piece of clothing they are viewing. It consists of two sections.
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The sustainability scale rating from 0 - 10 that acts as an easy-to-read visualization for users to get a general overview of the ethics and sustainability of the brand and clothing.​
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Three measurements of environmental impacts that the fast fashion industry directly contributes to: water pollution, textile waste, and the working conditions. To help the users better understand the sustainability score, we provide real numbers to provide context for the rating. For users who want to learn more about where the data comes from, they can click on the Read More link below each statistic to be redirected to the original source.
Alternatives
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Apart from informing users on the environmental impacts of fashion, we also wanted to provide real solutions that direct users towards eco-friendly fashion. Garb Em Green searches the Internet to find more sustainable clothing pieces similar to the clothing item that the user was browsing. Users can compare the sustainability rating from the fast fashion brand they are shopping at to the ratings of the suggested clothing items.
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Additionally, we considered that different users are shopping for different reasons such as brand, style, and price; this motivated us to add filters that organize the alternative options based on various user needs.
Favorites
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Users are able to save recommended alternatives so they can refer back to it later. An important feature of the Favorites page are the organized collections, which users can manually create or have automatically created based on brand. They can also filter their favorites based on most recently added or by price.
Account
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When the extension is first downloaded, the user is asked to create an account. This allows user data, such as favorites, to be saved so that they can access it from any device. The user can sign up using an existing Facebook or Google account, which can ease the process of filling out basic personal information, or sign up with their email. Once the user is signed in, they will automatically stay signed in unless they log out of their account.