1. Prototype link (Please submit a link to a playable prototype, not a link to your design file)
2. Describe your project (max 150 words) Write your answer here.
College students expressed that fashion is a form of self-expression, confidence, and uniqueness, however, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to fully express their styles due to a lack of time, finances, and identity confusion. Thus, to aid college students in expressing themselves and fostering communities of self-expression across campuses, our app, StyleSpark, integrates an AI that personalizes fashion choices based on users’ preferences, lifestyles, and personalities. It quickly generates visualizations of users in personalized outfits from scans of their closet to simplify the decision-making process, thereby reducing time and allowing students to fully express themselves. StyleSpark is also designed to be inclusive, including a database and accessible stores that cater to all body sizes, styles, genders, and budget constraints. To further foster campus communities of expression and empowerment, users can also share their styles, receive comment tips from others, and save others’ posts for AI to learn from.
3. Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources. (Max 500 words) Write your answer here.
We aimed to explore the barriers to college students exploring fashion, creating outfits, and communicating fashion ideas, as fashion has been highly correlated to self-expression. We designed a survey with 16 questions, including 4 mandatory written prompts, and distributed the survey in the Rice Design-a-thon Discord channel, to friends, and to college group chats. We also conducted ten interviews both before and after prototyping to gain insights into students’ pain points and thoughts. These surveys and interviews focused on three main research questions: (1) why college students care or don’t care about fashion, (2) what students’ concerns are when exploring fashion, and (3) how students gain their aesthetic sense and fashion inspiration.
We found that college students pursue fashion mostly for three reasons. First, students consider fashion a form of self-expression, empowerment, and personal uniqueness. As such, 60.4% of students were interested in exploring and finding their sense of style. During the young adult phase, university students explore and express their self-identities, and students value fashion as a tool to socialize and connect with like-minded individuals. For example, an LGBT+ participant elaborated on how dressing up enhances and assists them in being proud of their gender identities. Furthermore, incorporating fashion into daily life helps students feel more confident and productive. Students view having a satisfying outfit gives them a good start for the day, and being recognized by others also increases confidence. Lastly, college students place significant value on fashion for special events. More than 85% of the respondents consider dressing up for business, parties, and formal events moderately or extremely important. Despite their interests and the human-centered, psychological benefits of fashion, we found that many students did not create daily outfits because of the lack of time, indecisiveness, and unawareness of their styles. With students’ busy schedules, even some fashion enthusiasts generally don’t adopt daily fashion due to lacking motivation, such as presentations or dates. Interestingly, bad weather, such as rainy conditions, also accounts for unwillingness to dress up. Some general problems college students face regarding fashion include trouble finding their styles, matching outfits, and suitable sizes. College students may not be particularly familiar with branding and clothing titles. And since they are still exploring their aesthetics and identities, they don’t quite know their fashion styles. Even with a closet of clothes, matching them is a massive task. Additionally, some students also suffer at finding suitable clothing sizes, with different brands having different measurement standards. Finding a comfortable size is specifically difficult for those who are not at a common height or shape.
In terms of where students draw their fashion inspiration from, we concluded that the main three sources are social media, peers, and public fashion figures. P-Interest, Instagram, and TikTok seem to be the most popular fashion references of 60% of the participants. This suggests people’s perceptions and preferences on fashion can be influenced by surrounding styles and views.
4. Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words) Write your answer here.
Though many things went as planned throughout our brainstorming, researching, and designing, we did make some significant decision decisions and changes that shifted our focus and improved the app's functionality. We consider our three most important design decisions to be the chatbot incorporation of AI, generating weekly fashion plans, utilizing horizontal schedules to help visualization, and designing more user-friendly tutorials.
In our design process, we initially began with the idea of utilizing an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT since it can provide general assistance based solely on users' individual input preferences. However, our focus shifted after brainstorming and analyzing data from our research survey. In addition to general assistance in exploring and developing user styles, UX research highlighted other external factors, such as the weather and internal behavioral differences (e.g., sensitivity to certain temperatures). Thus, besides collecting individual preferences every time; the app shifted to also focusing on external factors since these factors greatly influence individual behaviors, thereby assisting users more with human-centered outcomes.
Another functionality we thought of is creating weekly fashion schedules. We initially wanted a solely vertical list of photos to wear each day. However, after usability testing and receiving user feedback, we also decided to integrate a horizontal schedule. This aids users in easily visualizing their weekly outfits, saving them time because it aligns with users' mental models of a horizontal, rather than vertical, conceptualization of time/timelines. However, we understand that some cultures may visualize time in a vertical way too, so we included both horizontal and vertical visualizations to create designs that are inclusive, including mental models from all cultures and improving universal user experiences.
Another decision we’ve adjusted is the “getting started” hook, which we previously had as, “AI recommends you fits based on your closet.” We previously considered our hook a very clear guideline to navigating through the app, however, when we asked passer-by peers to test it and provide their understanding of our app, some evaluated our main function as an e-commerce app. They were confused about what we meant by “recommendations,” assuming it solely meant shopping recommendations, and not that AI would generate outfits from their preexisting wardrobe. Thus, this challenged us to go beyond our initial assumptions of what was obvious to users, thereby changing the main hook to, “We’ll capture your body to better recommend styles and help you visualize your fit.” Also, the UI is inspired by Apple's Face ID process, something many users are familiar with to simplify the learning curve, which instantly familiarize the users with the app. This is more specific about the purpose and directions of the app, fostering greater understanding and enabling users to fully maximize all benefits to solve their problems. Ultimately, we learned that it is critical to go beyond our own assumptions and preexisting knowledge as the designer and instead think from the perspective of the user in order to fully maximize user understanding and overall experiences.
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