ThredUP
Bringing personalization to the online second hand shopping experience
ios App Feature Integration
Project Scope
One-week take home design exercise
Deliverable
High-Fidelity Screens & Prototype
Tools & Methods
Market Research, Competitive Benchmarking, High-Fidelity Wireframes, Sketch, Invision
industry research: The Rise of the Second Hand Economy
The “re-commerce” industry is a rapidly growing subset of the retail industry. New players have entered the space, each addressing different price points and leveraging different business models.
Peer to Peer: Sellers create accounts and post their own items for sale. Pros: Business isn’t liable for shipping & handling. Cons: Business is liable for fraudulent sales and cannot control or regulate quality of images, information, and prices.
Online Consignment: No connection between buyers and sellers. Pros: All items are verified for authenticity and quality, prices are regulated, merchandising is consistent. Cons: Costly shipping and handling on both the buyer and selling ends of the business.
ThredUP falls into the online consignment model. Unlike many of its peers or competitors, the company buys and sells items from affordable, accessible, and mass retailers. It sells through its desktop and mobile sites, as well as its mobile app.
Thredup’s value prop
As today’s consumers continue to prioritize and value experiences, their budget for “things” shrinks. Branding, the brand message, and the focus on the customer experience is increasingly important. More so, consumers are veering away from the large retailers that they were once loyal to in favor of upstart brands that champion transparency, social messages, and environmental awareness.
So, what is ThredUP really? The brand doesn’t just sell second hand clothes at affordable prices. It additionally sells the experience of being environmentally conscious and being a smart shopper. Most people don’t just go to ThredUP to sell their unwanted clothes for cash - they sell clothes in order to buy more on the site and continue the second-hand clothing cycle.
The problem space & Challenge
Imagine we'd like to add a new feature to thredUP that allows our customers to shop thredUP by building a whole outfit (including accessories and shoes) and seeing if they went well together.
ThredUP faces a logistical challenge: Low Individual Item Price Point + Shipping/Return Costs = Low Profit Margins. So while I was initially tasked with creating an outfit builder tool, I interpreted this task as finding a way for the business to successfully cross or up-sell customers in order to successfully increase the average order size to reduce back-end logistics costs to the business - in a way that seems organic, personalized, and exciting.
Design Inspiration
A whole crop of digitally native brands have been founded and built around personalized experiences and products. For design inspiration, I looked to consumer brands that rely on customer information entry for conversion. This included lingerie brand Prose, CPG start up Prose, custom clothing brand Fame & Partners, and department store leader Nordstrom.
Approach
In order to predict outfits that will resonate with each ThredUP shopper, I wanted to create a quick, multi-step quiz that gathered both customers’ style preferences and size and fit details. I also wanted to build a tool that would withstand time and “get smarter” each time it was used, so subsequent outfit recommendations will become increasingly relevant and personalized.
Allowances:
The ability to go back to previous steps within the quiz.
The ability to track progress within the quiz.
The ability to access the tool from more than one location in-app.
The ability to like and dislike items within each outfit builder tool in order to improve the recommendation algorithm.
Jumping into High Fidelity
Due to the tight deadline, I compressed the research and design cycle to focus mostly on creating high-fidelity designs. One of the biggest initial challenges I faced was how to integrate this feature within the existing app in both function and design. I created a three-step questionnaire tackling brand preference, style preference, and fit preference. ThredUP includes the item measurements for every SKU on its site, therefore, I wanted to tap into this existing information to predict best fit in addition to style.
Second Iteration Post-Feedback
I received several pieces of feedback from the product design team that ranged from UI suggestions to UX questions about how customers move from step to step. The main changes included clarifying and refining language and placement of buttons. Also, I added the ability to skip questions and edit the style profile after completing the quiz, so that customers could jump to outfit recommendations should they choose.
Next Steps
Get the feature in front of users for testing - make sure that the tool is asking the right questions from app users in order to be able to predict the best outfits.
How can this feature be integrated into all of ThredUP’s other product offerings so that it doesn’t just seem like an additional option: can it be integrated within the subscription box feature?
Give the ability to add all items to the cart at once?