Dress Up

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Inspiration

Our team considered the problem that many students have when it comes to wearing the right clothes to an event -- sometimes, it's hard to remember what all the different types of dress mean. It can be embarrassing or even legitimately problematic to wear the wrong type of clothes when you're attending an event that might influence the rest of your career. We created Dress Up to solve this problem while also keeping in mind the important factors of convenience (the reason why we chose an app) and sustainability.

What it does

To address the aforementioned issues, we created a page where users can create and save outfits for specific situations, or just if they want to remember what looked good together. We also made a question bank for users to get a better understanding of how they can dress sustainably; for example, choosing fabrics that can be worn multiple times to prevent frequent use of washing machines, which use up both water and electricity. Other functions include fashion and weather matching, which provide suggestions to users based on the type of weather or fabric styles/colors they enter, and searching for specific dress terms like "business casual", which then shows the user an example of that style while also listing common events at which it is worn and the specifics of what kind of clothes it allows. With these functions, we hoped to make getting dressed an easier and more environmentally-conscious experience for college students like us.

How I built it

For now, Dress Up is confined to a visual diagram of how the app would be built and how different buttons and pages would connect to each other. To do this, I used draw.io to create examples of each type of page on the app.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest issue I ran into while creating the Dress Up diagram was deciding how to format each page. There were multiple viable options for each one; for example, the outfit creator page could have had one button that went to a new page where different types of clothing articles could be selected. However, I went with what I thought was simultaneously the most condensed and most useful format possible for each page.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that we now have a complete layout for all of Dress Up's pages and functions. The difficult creative segment of coming up with a solution to our problem and successfully designing it is now over, leaving only the technical segment of actually coding the app.

What I learned

I learned that while it seems that coding in general is more difficult than just designing an app, it definitely requires a lot of work and brainstorming to determine what the best layouts are in order to increase efficiency while still looking refined and organized.

What's next for Dress Up

The next step for Dress Up is to actually build the design we created into a real app.

Spark-Specific Questions:

Your name, other participant's names (if applicable), and your email address and those of your teammates (if applicable)

Perry Katsarakes (perryk@bu.edu), Marco Raigoza (mraigoza@bu.edu)

Test or Project Name

Dress Up

Explicit Hypothesis (Please include a hypothesis that states the problem and addresses the solution you are proposing)

Our problem is that for college students like us, it can be hard to know how to dress for certain events (what events mandate what type of dress, what each type of dress actually means, etc.) that often have a significant impact on our lives in college and beyond. Our hypothesis is that if we offer an app which conveniently describes dress styles and offers examples of clothing items that fit them while also promoting sustainability, then it will be much easier and less stressful for students to attend these events and succeed in their careers.

Please provide the scope of your project

Our project is an app intended for college students nationwide, but could also be utilized by users of all ages

Primary goal of the project

See "Inspiration"

Additional goals of the project

See "Inspiration" and "What it does"

Platform (desktop, mobile, web, native app et...) the test or campaign will run on

An app for iPhone or Android

Resources/skillsets (design, simple development, complex development) required for test setup

Design for creating user interface, relatively complex Objective-C coding for building the app itself (which was not done)

Why/how did you choose this project?

See "Inspiration"

Built With

• draw.io