Week One of Building Sustainable FashHub
This week, in order to make sure everything goes according to plan for my website to be, the Sustainable FashHub, I dove right into some user research (For anyone who isn’t familiar with my latest project, take a peek at my last blog). User research can be done in a wide variety of ways. For this project, I decided to use a few different methods to get better acquainted with my future users.
The following are approaches that were taken this past week:
- Field research
- Online research
- User mapping
Trying to create a website without completing practices, such as these, or similar, can easily lead a designer to failure. After all, how can you cater to your audience if you don’t know anything about them? It’s probable that performing user research will bring you more than one “ah-ha” moment.
Read on to see what I learned this past week.
Field Research
My first course of action was to go straight to “the people” to ask them, simply, what they would want out of a sustainable fashion blog. I did a quick brainstorm of some survey questions and narrowed it down to these two multiple-choice questions:
How interested are you in living a sustainable lifestyle?
a) Uninterested
b) Somewhat interested
c) Interested
What would be your main drive for visiting a sustainable fashion website?
a) Learning trendy upcycling techniques
b) Reading up on the latest sustainable fashion research developments
c) Keeping informed on retailers who create and sell ethical garments
d) Finding ways to do your part in keeping our planet healthy – fashion trends aside
I kept the survey short, sweet, and to the point to not scare any people off from participating. The idea was to get answers that will help determine what will get people to enter the Sustainable FashHub. Should the site be presented as an ethical fashion data hub, or as a chic, trendy, progressive blog?
I started to collect answers from friends and family members and quickly decided to take my short survey to social media. I utilized Instagram’s story features to present my questions to my digital following. In the end, I had 43 responses that gave me good information to move forward with. Specific results can be read here in my production journal.
Online research
Now that I had a hunch that my target audience was a younger female crowd, interested in sustainability, but driven by fashion, I wanted to do some deeper research to back up my findings.
I was able to find some reliable sources that made me feel confident in my survey results. Harvard Business Review writes that 88% of UK and US Millenials believe that luxury brands need to do more to influence ethical fashion. More specifically, an article by BizWomen states that Millenials are also more likely and willing to spend a larger amount on items produced sustainability.
My survey results also brought attention to the fact that, while users care about sustainability, they are not interested in data being at the forefront of the website. For this reason, I did some more research on how younger Internet users consume information. Perhaps dense data blogs won’t hit right with Millenial women, but inserting bits of data throughout the website will make just the right amount of impact. After all, the data must be present on the Sustainable FashHub website. It is just a matter of how it should be displayed. An article by SearchEnginePeople states that scannable content is best for a younger audiences in general.
User Mapping
Once I had completed all of my researching, I took what I had accumulated and started dreaming up the end-users of the Sustainable FashHub. I created a persona, Anna Lewis, who is a 24-year-old New York City resident who has been sucked into the fast fashion vortex, but looking to find her way out. Her full persona can be seen here.
From her persona, I created an empathy map and her personal journey map. Both brought up new realizations. For instance, her empathy map made me think about the struggle of leaving the convenience of fast fashion behind. How can Sustainable FashHub lessen this pain?
All three of these research methods flowed easily from one to the next giving me new information on how to proceed with my soon-to-be website. This preliminary user exploration has provided a good foundation for my next task; creating the information architecture for the Sustainable FashHub.
Samantha Mantiglia 