TAILORU

Prototyping UX/UI Design Research Branding Wireframing

"TAILORU is a changemaker that is well versed in both the technological and creative space. TAILORU aims to revolutionize the use of technology in our daily lives through seamless integration and adoption to our culture, traditions and habits."

1.5 Months

Designer 1/3

Background

Our client for this project,TAILORU, is a custom clothing marketplace. It is user driven, where clothing makers tell their story and list custom clothing pieces to find higher end customers looking for handmade, artisanal clothing.

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Learning About the Problem

To begin the project, my team and I met with the Founder of TAILORU. We learned the scope of the project: to make a design system for the clothing marketplace application. We realized that it is more important to create a unique visual language and brand for the future of the app than to flesh out every screen from limited UX wireframes.

With the client, we created a workshop activity to discuss how we might go about solving problems around the product. We discussed inclusivity, how to move the brand forward, and how to best support the community within TAILORU. Here is the end result:

My Solution

All Final Deliverables

Starting Point

Our team started with assets provided by the client which included wireframes for the product and a project brief/brand story. Some key quotes from these greatly helped our team decide on some design principles to guide our process. These quotes were:

“TAILORU aims to revolutionize the use of technology in our daily lives through seamless integration and adoption to our culture, traditions and habits.”

“Our purpose is to create synergy between technology and humanity to enable and drive progress.”

“Create a space and community where culture, tradition and technology can co-exist and thrive off one another to enhance the art of craftsmanship. “

Based on this, we chose these core principles in order to represent what TAILORU stands for in an innovative design reflective of the personal experience the app aims to be.

Early Ideas

To begin, we created mood boards and corresponding style tiles. I came up with three divergent design directions in order to select one to move forward with, based on user and client feedback. In these tiles, I took three approaches: include the colors of the existing logo in a clean gradient that was elegant and light, maintain a black and white color scheme but remain modern and elegant highlighting the style of the clothing products, and focus on evoking a theme of craftsmanship through unique shapes and textures.

Important User & Client Feedback

Throughout this project, we did rounds of user interviews and client reviews on all major deliverables. The first of these rounds started after the creation of the style tiles. I reviewed them with the client and noticed she did not have strong opinions on any of them, which ended up backing up my most important takeaway. While constructive feedback was limited, so was positive. The client and most users felt the designs lacked a distinct personality and were similar in style. This is because stylistic elements were very subtle and fonts all across the board were sans-serif and clean, which limited any possibility of a strong connection back to the TAILORU brand. I designed more so with modern/clean visual appeal in mind, something present in my personal design style. The client recognized this and mentioned how TAILORU was looking to be more distinct and needed more to communicate its story. I realized that I needed to get outside of my comfort zone to truly create something fitting for this brand and for this product. While the client okayed any one of the three to move forward with, I didn’t want something to barely hit the mark with trendy and modern design but something that was targeted, unique, and equally as beautiful and appealing.

What Did the Users Have to Say?

Based on what went well and what didn’t with my style tiles, I headed in a new design direction and began high fidelity designs. I had the goal of upping visual interest and brand connection through serif typography, the introduction of a stylistic pattern, and a new color scheme.

Significant feedback from the user and client involved the font choice. We tested everything from handwritten to clean sans-serif fonts and found the answer to be somewhere in between. Both the client and users wanted something unique to this experience that would break the mold and significantly add to the aesthetic of the app. This led me to select the font Slick Slant, it is clean and contains sharp geometric details. This connects well to the idea of clothing tailoring and fashion patterns and could be signatory to the TAILORU brand.

The next design element present in my first hi-fi iteration is the introduction a colorful pattern. I found this picture as inspiration for my color palette. Patterns like this are very prevalent in artisan clothing sold in the TAILORU marketplace. Finding ways to subtly incorporate this pattern throughout the app was challenging. In the first round of high fidelity designs, I decided to subtly incorporate patterns as the screen's background. I also used patterns to ground the top header section as shown below:

Core Pieces In Place, Time to Iterate & Polish

Throughout this project, after every major iteration of the design, we had multiple rounds of user interviews and sprint based client meetings to gather feedback and review our work. As a result, multiple elements of my design changed significantly throughout the project. I started with the onboarding to polish my design direction and then expanded into other screens of the app.

First of all, the pattern’s usage and style saw drastic change by the last iteration. It originated as a bright geometrical design and ended up a more subtle floral pattern. Users struggled to see the connection of the more abstract pattern and wanted a more clear connection to the brand. I felt a floral style better aligned with TAILORU and could utilize the color palette my team and I picked out with the client. This new pattern alludes to elements of nature and humanity but also is a gender-neutral pattern found on lots of clothing. I found creative ways to use this even on content-heavy screens and throughout the app.

Whitespace usage and imagery were modified as well. I tried versions of the onboarding that were space-efficient with multiple forms and buttons per page. I later iterated away from this because the client wanted large and impressive imagery and users didn’t like having

Lastly, I finalized colors and other UI elements that would be present in the rest of my design. I used a color palette my team and the client arrived at and was further assured by overwhelmingly positive feedback from users on these colors.

multiple tasks per page and felt overwhelmed. Both of these problems could be solved by creating more screen real estate by keeping everything to one task per page. This decreased the visual load on the user and gave me the ability to blow up the size of the imagery on each screen.

Final Results

My team, while separating to work on three different design directions throughout the course of the project, converged into one design system to deliver to the client. While my initial style tiles may have missed the mark in some ways, my final designs ended up highlighted as the base for my group’s final system. I was able to better my design by being very mindful of client and user feedback to create a much more fitting final solution. The client was satisfied with our final deliverable and the user feedback took a much more positive turn.

Here is a link to the final design system and some of my HI-FI screen examples.

Conclusions - What went right, What would I do better?

What Went Right

First off, I made significant improvement throughout the project. I broke out of my comfort zone and away from my usual design style and in the end, it worked out for the better. I was good at using client and user feedback to make substantial and effective changes and arrive at interesting solutions.

What I Would Do Better

I would spend more time in the beginning asking better questions and combing through every sentence of the brief. If I did this better, I could have avoided such a major design direction change. Aswell, when I pivoted off of my style tiles, I just began my high-fidelity screens based on feedback instead of actually recreating a better-suited tile. Respecting the design process more in this way would have made my life easier so I could manifest my new design direction quickly and more cohesively.

Thank you for reading!