Thrifting

Project: Core Feature, Silver Studio

Role: Lead Designer/Researcher

Project Charter

Silver Studio is Genies’ digital fashion app. At the time of this redesign, users were able to design fashion items, create outfits, post to a feed to receives “Rates,” and get on a leaderboard.

With the release of Ratings & Rankings, I dove back into user studies to see how users were reacting to this new game-loop. I discovered two types of users: Creators and Curators.
a) Creators were users that spent a lot of effort and time creating unique wearables.
b) Curators were users that wanted to acquire items to create outfits without needing to put effort into creating each piece of clothing.

Two prominent problems came up for these users:
Problem a) Creators weren’t feeling recognized or rewarded for their wearable creations. They would spend hours creating one item only for it to be lost in a feed.
Problem b) Creating wearables is too complex for the average daily user, leading to less outfit creation.


A business requirement arose during this feature that needed to seamlessly fit within this design. Genies was developing a crowdsourced UGC wearable program called The Workshop where users could create their own 3D wearables for Genies digital ecosystem. We needed to give these creators attribution and surface their creations. They would receive compensation on interactions with their items released into our ecosystem.

Solution

How might we make it easier for users to create outfits?

How might we reward and recognize users that spend time to create wearables?

Through research and user testing sessions over previous months, I found thrifting to be the most popular behavior amongst our target users. Silvers would spend hours sifting through racks of clothes to find unique pieces for their wardrobe.

My hypothesis was that this concept would translate to digital fashion perfectly. By giving users the ability to thrift each other’s creations, we would solve the problems for both creators and curators. Creators would be able to be recognized for their wearables by having their items thrifted by other users while getting attribution and credit for their work. Curators would be able to acquire unique pieces to their closet without the need to spend hours creating items.