No Stress Dress

Shop. Dress. Plan. All in one.

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Inspiration

Almost every morning, every trip, and every occasion, each of us has struggled to find an outfit. There’s so many sweaters, dresses, skirts, shirts, and accessories we own, but we don’t know what to wear when and how to utilize every clothing item in the best possible way. In addition to just that, deciding what to wear according to the weather is so difficult - we never know if it’s going to be too cold or too hot. After conducting user research by asking our parents, siblings, friends, and fellow hackathon members, we realized that this was a problem for everyone. To eliminate the 17 minutes spent on average choosing an outfit and the 13 million tons of textile waste from clothing every year, we decided it was an important problem to tackle and so we chose to spend our time at the PixelHacks Hackathon to create No Stress Dress. We hope that our mobile application will act as a convenience for everyone and save time, money, and stress.

What it does

No Stress Dress allows users to not only have an app pick out their outfits, but also plan out outfits for the week, plan outfits for travel, wear rarely worn clothes more often, and online shop while adding fantasy items to a virtual closet. Users are able to either have the app pick an outfit for them depending on their desired style of the day, the weather, and even their mood, in order to expedite their morning routine or even try out a new style using clothes that are already in the user’s wardrobe. Secondly, users are able to plan outfits about a week in advance whether it be to make the packing process simpler for a vacation or just to keep an extremely busy week from becoming a full-blown catastrophe. No Stress Dress also tracks the frequency with which a user wears every item in their wardrobe, encouraging users to wear everything they own and to not buy clothes they already own or are unlikely to wear, decreasing the money and resources wasted on excessive clothing. Finally, No Stress Dress allows the user to shop and browse online at their favorite stores. If the user buys the item through our app it will be automatically added to their virtual wardrobe, but the user can easily manually input pieces into their wardrobe that they already own. It’s also possible to add fantasy items into a wardrobe to see what combinations could be made with that piece of clothing to aid the user in their decision to purchase or not purchase a specific item of clothing. Overall, No Stress Dress will take care of any possible clothing worries, allowing users to focus on what happens after they get dressed.

How we built it

We chose to use the human-centered design process to facilitate our process. We first conducted user interviews and researched online to gather data and provide insights into the problem. We then reframed our goal to best fit the needs of our user and then started the prototyping process. Our app, No Stress Dress, was built using a variety of developing platforms. For the IOS Application aspect, we used DropSource to develop the screens and the functionality. All of the screens of the application were designed using the Sketch Designing Tool to create cohesive and aesthetic graphics. In addition, we create a website to promote our application which was created using HTML and CSS through Atom. We published our HTML and CSS on GitHub and used it as a host of our website. For our other graphics, we used GIMP to develop additional pictures and modifications to our existing work. Furthermore, for our presentation, we decided to use a template from SlidesCarnival to ensure there was a structure to our presentation and included interactive slides that were interesting to the audience. To record our screen for the application, we used QuickTime Player and uploaded it to Google Drive in order to incorporate it into our presentation.

Challenges we ran into

As relatively inexperienced IOS mobile app developers, we struggled with finding a platform to develop an app that we would be able to effectively use in a time constraint. Eventually, after looking for many platforms where we would be able to create a functional app we decided on using DropSource, a simple developing environment for beginners. We also ran into trouble building and publishing our accompanying website, built using HTML and CSS, using GitHub, but eventually figured out how to properly use GitHub to host our website despite having little to no experience with using GitHub. In order to advance our learning, we collaborated with our peers and shared our strengths with one another to improve the team as a whole. Furthermore, we used the help of the mentors by asking questions and communicating through #Slack. After 24 hours, we were finally able to develop a mobile application and website that effectively convey our message and solve the problems we targeted.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After this hackathon, we’re most proud of the fact that we were all able to put together our strengths to create an application, website, and presentation in such a short amount of time. Before this hackathon, none of us had created an IOS application and had very minimal knowledge in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. However, after working with mentors, learning from workshops, and researching online, we were able to learn so much in 24 hours and were able to actually create an impressive final product. Going forward, we hope to highlight all of the unique features of our application to the judges and explain that our application is different and more useful than the usual outfit picker app.

What we learned

Throughout the entire hackathon, we learned a lot throughout the workshops and from collaborating with one another. The mentors were very helpful and taught us about Machine Learning, UX, and Android Development, which were all very beneficial in providing background for our application creation. Most importantly, the entire process of creating the application and the website pushed us to improve our teamwork skills, communication skills, design skills, and multitasking skills. By practicing our presentation, we also developed public speaking and persuasive skills and were able to convince other people that our idea would be viable as an application.

What's next for No Stress Dress

We aim to form partnerships with major and minor clothing brands so that we can promote our app on their social media and they can promote their products on our app, potentially scoring exclusive deals just for members of No Stress Dress. We also aim to promote our app through social media pages, including our current website, as well as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook pages.

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