Designing a Mobile-Responsive App for Clothes Reservation - Vinnies Insider

The Background of The Client Vinnies

Vinnies (St Vincent de Paul) is a social enterprise committed to social good, from supporting individuals in need to play its part in saving the planet. Its op shops play a significant role in this mission. Vinnies aims to be the number one destination for affordable and pre-loved items. Every purchase or donation inspires change in the local community.

The Problem Faced by Vinnies

The impact of fast fashion and accessories is having a negative impact on our environment,well-being and cost of living. While there is growing awareness about the benefits of sustainable products, Vinnies is seeing an increase in consumer donations of such items, especially items which consumers deem “expired” or “out of trend”.

The Solution for Vinnies

Vinnies has a range of clothes for people to choose from, and its target audience is seeking something unique to match their personal style. However, it's difficult to find the right clothes that match different personalities. The mission is to help the target audience quickly and easily define their personal styles and find the same styles at Vinnies.

Full Case Study Goes Here:

Our Project Goal

The goal of the project is to understand the current way Vinnies accepts and sells donated clothes and look for opportunities to attract desirable donations and increase interest and sales. The increased sales ultimately mean more opportunities for Vinnies to support the community. The other important goal is to understand how people donate items, when, to whom, and the reasons why so that Vinnies can better serve the community and communicate with them effectively.

Our Research Methods

Research

• To understand the basic ideas of Vinnies’s history, service, funding, donation, competitors; also trying to be a user of Vinnies to donate for understanding the donation process. 

• Doing research on Vinnies’ website, such as how to donate at Vinnies and how the charity funding runs at Vinnies as well as other similar organisations, such as Australian Red Cross, finding out what services they provide.

• I found Vinnies provides online functionality for donating money, clothes, furniture, toys, and so on; as well as the traditional method of dropping off items at a physical store. 

• I found the Vinnies website encouraged donors to donate certain values, as the certain values show what people could do with the amount of money, such as “$46 can provide nutritious food so women like Joa have the basics to survive the cold weather ”. The donation could also be a one off payment or monthly donation. 

• I found it’s hard to find the information that I was searching for on Vinnies’ website, due to the unclear information architecture of the website; there’s not clear navigation and a lot of information could be on the one web page. I had to go back to Google and type Vinnies with what I wanted to find all the time. 

User Surveys

• To understand quantitative data regarding donating or shopping at op shops, including their ages, occupations, how, why, and how often to donate and purchase, which op shops they regularly go to, online op shops, etc. 

• My team members and I brainstormed some questions for the survey, after discussion, we had 10 questions in total on Google Survey. 

• We shared the link to our friends and families. In the end, we had 19 people that did the survey. The below pictures show the partial survey results: 

Competitive Analysis

• To define who the primary and secondary competitors are, to understand  primary and secondary competitors’ service, for example, online donations and e-commerce; and how to use their websites/apps, such as Salvos (primary) and Australia Red Cross (secondary). 

• Doing research on competitors’ websites and recording what the features they have on the websites, comparing their existing website features with Vinnies’ features. 

• I found that Salvos' website has the e-commerce feature, but Vinnies doesn’t. However, it’s challenging to manage an e-commerce site for a charity organisation, as they have different items in different shops and generally only a single unit of each item.

In-Store Contextual Enquiry

• To understand people’s donation and purchasing behaviours by gathering observations at different op shops. 

• I found people usually had no intention to browse the items at op shops, but if they had the intention of buying something, they would ask the shop owner or staff where to find the item. This could be the labelling is not helpful or some no labelling in some areas, and the items are not organised at the shops.

One-on-One Interviews

• To understand who visits Vinnies and their thoughts about Vinnies in depth:  from Vinnies staff: how the donation and purchasing system works in Vinnies, who works for Vinnies, what’s the everyday working life in Vinnies, etc.

• From Customers: who they are (including occupation, gender, education history, living area, etc. ), what the motivations are to donate and buy at Vinnies, what the donation and purchasing behaviours, etc.

• We conducted around 500 face-to-face Interviews in total at our local Vinnies shops with over 50 people across Australia and Asia. Our demographics ranged from all genders, from 18-70 years old and of all backgrounds. 

• I interviewed 10 people, including buyers, donors, volunteers, and owners from Vinnies and another charity op shop.

• We prepared around 40 questions for each category of buyers, donors, volunteers, and owners before the interviews, depending on interviewees’ answers to extend some specific questions. We took notes during the interviews for documenting.

• I found most of the customers from Vinnies strongly believe in sustainable fashion and they buy and donate clothes at the same time. 

Task Analysis

• To understand best practices for online purchases and donations by researching other charitable organisations purchasing/donating steps, such as Go Fund Me, Salvos, Australia Red Cross, and Lifeline.

• To understand how online purchases and donate by going through the donating and purchasing steps from different donation websites, such as Go Fund Me, Salvos, Australia Red Cross, and Lifeline.

• I donated money on Go Fund Me and Lifeline, and purchased a piece of clothes from Salvos and Australia Red Cross. I recorded how many steps until finishing the order and what they are. 

• I found it’s easy to donate the money; Go Fund Me asked me to include some tips with the donation. For the e-commerce site, I could only choose to post to my place, as only one shop had the clothes that I wanted.

What Did Our Users Say?

We used affinity mapping to synthesise the data from 50 user interviews. We found the patterns and collected the same patterns in groups and by using the “I” statement to summarise the groups and understand the users’ perspectives better.

Based on the data, Interviewees at Vinnies most likely have both donation and shopping behaviours at the same time, the below examples show some details of the two behaviours:

Shopping behaviour:

eg. “I want​ to buy unique items that are hard to find”

Donation behaviour:

eg. “I want to help those in need”

Our AHA Moment 

We decided the focus of our project would be on people's shopping behaviours, as more interviewees from our data contributed to shopping behaviours. In shopping behaviours, there are big groups of interviewees that focus on contributing to sustainability, buying items that are good value, buying unique items that are hard to find, and not wanting to spend time sorting for items.

Empathy Map

For emphasising more with our users and helping us build an archetype, we compiled what users have said, thought, did and felt from our interview insights. 

The empathy map helped us remove the bias from our design and align us on a single, shared understanding of the user.

After this, building an archetype was more straight forward from here.

Who Is Our Archetype?

We decided to create Ada as our archetype.The reason why we didn’t create Ada as a persona was that we had a very wide range of interviewees from different cultural backgrounds, age groups, occupations, and so forth.

We had two versions of Ada. The first version was not very clear about her needs as her core needs were divided between sustainability and uniquity, so we refined everything in our second version to focus on one key point, which was the final version of the archetype.

Our version 2 Ada is "The thrifty fashionista," who wants to express their personal style to find unique items. The pain points include finding that browsing for items was time-consuming due to stores being both poorly organised, as well as difficulty in finding unique high quality items that met her needs. 

The behaviours include shopping in a local op shop, spending time browsing brough Vinnies physical stores, seeking out unique and stylish fashion, and getting excited when finding unexpected items. This leads to the problem statement: the target audience needs to find unique clothing items so that they can express their personal style. 

Our Problem Statement 

We wrote five problem statements. After discussing the archetype’s goal, needs and pain points, we started to consider what is Ada's motivation to buy unique clothes? And What unique means to Ada?

Our final problem statement was:

“Ada needs to find unique clothing items so that she can express her personal style.”

Our Journey Map

We created a journey map about Ada shopping at Vinnies, from she was excited to plan to go to Vinnies to buy new clothes to she was disappointed to go home, as she couldn’t find what she wanted. 

This map highlights the pain point of shopping at Vinnies, helps to visualise the journey of the archetype and helps to point out opportunities for HMWs.

Our Prototype

After gaining a better understanding of the required screens and features, I sketched out ideas for organizing the features on each screen. The prototype went from a paper prototype to a mid-fi prototype, and then to a hi-fi prototype.

We conducted 1-on-1 usability tests on our prototype by using Marvel (for low-fi prototype) and Figma (for mid-fi and high-fi prototype) to allow the users to go through the wireflow after giving them the scenario. Our goals were to assess how successful the users are in completing the task of subscribing and reserving an item of their style and from their preferred store locations and found the problems that they faced during the process.

Our low-fi prototype

Our User Testing

I conducted 3-5 user tests for each prototype, and I created charts to track the user flow and record and observe user behaviours. In total, we have 15-25 user tests for each prototype.

Our Branding

As a sub-brand of Vinnies, I decided to maintain some aspects of the old branding while also bringing in some new elements for Vinnies Insider. For the color palette, I kept the main colors of navy blue and white from Vinnies but added other fun and youthful colors such as cyan. For typography, I chose two typefaces for the project: Lalezar as the Vinnies Insider logo typeface and Verdana as the paragraph typeface. The main idea was to create a friendly and youthful style for users.

I also created illustrations and took photographs of the fashion style pages and items, as well as models wearing the items. I wanted to visually engage users and help them understand the key elements of the onboarding process by providing visual clues for when they needed to choose their styles and match them with items.

Our Results

The final product resulted in a collaborative feature that solved different users’ pain points. The users could use the style choice to define their styles first, then choosing the unique pieces items for them from their selected Vinnies stores.