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i am ANCA FU
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TIMELINE
4 Months
TEAM
Jess Cummings
Elliot Heldman
Maddie House
Justin Mason
ROLE
Product Designer
SKILLS
UX Research
Visual Design
Interface Design
Prototyping
STORY
We were tasked to create a platform that promotes sustainability. Our team's shared interest in fashion led us to focus on the resale of second-hand clothing. Our research revealed that the main barriers to resale are convenience and pricing transparency.
To address these issues, we designed a platform with two interfaces, one for sellers and one for store employees, to streamline the resale process.
THE BACKGROUND
The average American discards around 81.5 pounds of clothing annually.
In the United States, around 17 million tons of textiles are produced each year, yet only about 2.5 million tons are recycled. The remaining waste is largely landfilled or incinerated, generating greenhouse methane gas and leaching toxic chemicals and dyes into the groundwater and our soil.
THE PROBLEM
People avoid reselling clothes due to a lack of convenience and pricing transparency.
Based on our competitor research and user interviews, we found that the primary barriers to resale for both sellers and employees are consistent, primarily centered around convenience and pricing transparency.
“I don’t want to waste my time going through a bunch of platforms just to figure out how much my item is worth.”
Frequent Seller
Convenience
Sellers find the resale process time-consuming with too many steps and scattered platforms.
Employees have item preferences but lack an efficient way to communicate them.
Pricing Transparency
Sellers visit multiple stores or platforms to compare offers and find the best resale value.
Employees spend a significant amount of time checking prices for the items brought in.
THE PROBLEM STATEMENT
The second-hand resale market faces challenges with pricing transparency and operational efficiency, impacting both sellers and resale businesses.
THE CHALLENGE
Design a platform that improves pricing transparency and streamlines operations for sellers and employees.
Since we wanted to support both sellers and employees, we chose to focus on the transaction process at secondhand clothing stores. Our goal was to design a solution that streamlines clothing drop-offs, making the experience faster and more efficient for both sides.
THE SOLUTION (FOR THE SELLERS)
Sellers can log their items to see which resale stores offer the best deals and which of their items are accepted.
The seller version allows users to enter item details and instantly view price offers from nearby stores. After selecting a store, the platform generates a QR code for drop-off, making the process much more efficient. Sellers can also view which stores prefer specific item types, helping them choose the most profitable option.
Price Map
The map displays price offers from different resale stores. Sellers can choose a store based on location through the map or apply filters such as highest price, closest store, or best match. This feature eliminates the need to search multiple platforms for prices, allowing sellers to quickly find the best offer.
QR Code for Drop-Off
After the seller enters the item details and selects a store, ReSell generates a QR code that employees can scan to instantly access the information. This eliminates the need for sellers to wait while employees manually check and price each item.
Store Wishlist
If sellers are unsure what items to bring or simply want to earn more, they can check the store's wishlist, published by employees. Items on the wishlist are in high demand, meaning the store is likely to offer higher prices if sellers bring them in.
THE SOLUTION (FOR THE EMPLOYEES)
Employees no longer need to make sellers wait while they check prices and determine which items to accept.
The employee version allows staff to scan the seller’s QR code and instantly view item details. Once the items are verified, employees can complete the payment immediately, removing the need for sellers to wait. Employees can also manage a store wishlist, updating which items they are currently looking to buy.
Store Wishlist
Since each store has different needs and preferences for the types of clothing they want or lack in stock, they can share these items in a wishlist. This feature enables more efficient communication with sellers, encouraging them to bring in the types of clothing the store needs.
QR Code Scan
Instead of manually inspecting each item's quality and searching for prices in the system, the QR code provides all necessary information upfront. Employees only need to verify the accuracy of the information and can confirm payment immediately, significantly reducing drop-off wait time.
Item Summary Edit
If an item has an inaccurate piece of information or the store cannot accept it for any reason, the employee can edit the item details or remove it from the summary. The system will automatically update the pricing based on these changes, significantly speeding up the drop-off process.
SUCCESS
Our project was awarded 1st place among 30 sustainability UX designs.
We delivered a five-minute presentation showcasing our entire design process from initial research to the final prototypes. Our project placed first in a vote participated in by 150 students.
THE START
We wanted to focus on sustainable fashion, but we did not have a specific area in mind, so we explored a range of topics. We focused on the broader issue of the disposal, reselling, and recycling of clothes.
RESEARCH PART ONE
A competitor analysis of four existing systems that address clothing disposal, reselling, and recycling.
Maintaining the sustainability of clothes involves multiple steps before they arrive at the landfill. From donations taken to physical spaces, to reselling in physical locations, and even redistributing by selling online, these are current actions people take before an item is disposed of in the trash. We are investigating existing systems that address clothing disposal, reselling, and recycling. Each of these systems offers some benefits but also has significant shortcomings, creating opportunities for improvement that we can design for.
RESEARCH PART TWO
We conducted 15 interviews with active participants in the secondhand clothing market.
Our interviews focused on understanding both acquisition and disposal behaviors within the secondhand clothing market. We interviewed a wide range of people, including people who make it their point to buy secondhand, consumers of thrifting, sellers who make their living finding and selling secondhand clothing, and employees who sort or approve their stores accepting donated or buying secondhand clothes. Participants were asked about their experiences buying, selling, or donating clothing, as well as their motivations, decision-making factors, and pain points during each stage of the process.
Four of the interviewees were employees at secondhand clothing stores. Employees were asked additional questions about their experiences working in stores, including how they evaluate items, determine pricing, and interact with sellers or those who donate.
After discussing our interviews as a team and doing card sorting exercises, we identified and summarized the three most frequently mentioned pain points in the process of disposing of or acquiring second-hand clothing.
Convenience Over Sustainability
People favor quick cleanouts over sustainability, making quality control difficult for stores. They are also more likely to thrift when it is easily accessible.
Transparency in Pricing and Sorting
People are curious about how stores evaluate and price clothing, yet processes are often opaque, leading to mistrust and hesitation in selling high-quality items.
Quality and Acceptance Gaps
Items are rejected due to quality or fit, highlighting the need for clearer drop-off guidelines. Buyers also have concerns about item quality when shopping online.
IDEATION (SKETCHES)
Each drew 32 potential solutions that help clothes travel sustainably through each stage of the clothing lifecycle.
We aimed to generate as many solutions as possible, no matter how unconventional they seemed, so each team member sketched 32 potential ideas. These sketches illustrated user interactions, devices, settings, and actions, with a focus on exploring a wide range of possibilities rather than settling on a final solution.
IDEATION (PERSONAS)
To understand key stakeholders, we created three personas: the employee, the seller, and the buyer.
By revisiting our interviews and transcripts, we identified three key perspectives in the second-hand clothing ecosystem: buyers, sellers, and the employees who facilitate transactions between them. To represent this range of stakeholders, we created personas that include an employee, a seller, and a buyer.
While we incorporated standard persona elements such as biography, goals, frustrations, quotes, and demographics, we also added factors specific to the secondhand clothing market. These included style preferences and motivations unique to clothing decisions. These additions allowed us to create personas that more accurately reflected the real needs and behaviors of users throughout the clothing lifecycle.
IDEATION (SCENARIOS)
To explore our solutions in context, we created one scenario each for an employee, a seller, and a buyer.
To begin the process of developing scenarios, our team discussed our sketches and selected a few potential solutions from our sketches to highlight in these scenarios: allowing in-person stores to sell more clothes online, providing price estimates on second-hand clothing, informing users of current offerings at local resale stores, and ranking sustainability practices at different resale stores.
Employee
Seller
Buyer
Key Guide
Setting
Agent
Goals
Actions
Events
Employee
Vivian is a store manager at Plato's Closet, but her dream is to own her own resale shop. At Plato's Closet, she has been working diligently to buy and sell more clothing items across the store. Vivian wants to speed up the process of getting more clothes available for sale online (trigger), as more sellers are approaching the store, and buyers are eager for new items. She believes the store's process for sorting clothes is pretty efficient, but sees the opportunity to list the entire store inventory online, instead of just select pieces (pain point). One evening after the store closes, Vivian explores the features on the app her store uses to estimate clothing prices. She finds an online shop feature on the app, which allows her to catalog items directly into the store's online inventory with minimal effort, and automatically deletes items if they are sold in person. She uses the store's database to quickly upload the details of each new item that arrived earlier in the day. Vivian is relieved (emotion) that she doesn't have to manually re-enter item details and can still ensure the store's in-person and online sales are aligned. By utilizing the app, Vivian successfully lists more items online without disrupting in-store sales, helping the store keep up with both in-person and online demand (resolution).
IDEATION (STORYBOARDS)
We turned two of the scenarios into storyboards that visually illustrate the user journey.
Out of the three scenarios, we decided to focus on the employee and seller ones. The visualization helped us imagine what our solutions could potentially look like and how they could serve our target users.
Employee
Seller
MAKING THE BIG DECISION
After further discussion, we realized we could support both employees and sellers by creating a solution that streamlines their transaction process, instead of choosing just one user group to focus on.
IDEATION (USER FLOW)
We created a user flow for a platform designed to improve interactions between employees and sellers.
We decided to design two versions of our platform: an tablet version for employees, based on interviews indicating that resale store staff primarily use tablets, and a mobile version for sellers. After determining the features for each version, we created detailed user flows for both employees and sellers to ensure a seamless and intuitive experience across the entire platform.
DESIGN & EVALUATION (LOW-FI)
Our goal was to create enough screens and interactions to gather initial feedback on our user flow.
We conducted user testing with five classmates, asking them to perform tasks using our prototype, while we observed whether they could complete the tasks and identified which parts were confusing or difficult to use. We also asked for their feedback on the prototype at the end of the session. The two tasks were to find the store offering the highest price, as a seller, and update the store's wishlist to include men's boots, as an employee.
From this testing, we received extensive feedback, but the following three takeaways were some of the most important ones that informed our design changes.
Wishlist Edit
Users found adding items slow, so we simplified to typing and publishing directly instead of editing.
Store Filter
Back Buttons
Before
After
DESIGN & EVALUATION (MID-FI)
We conducted more testing to see if our improvements were effective and to identify any remaining issues.
We conducted another round of user testing with five new participants. The seller's task remained the same: finding the store offering the highest price. However, we changed the employee task to processing a drop-off batch for compensation, as this feature had not been tested previously.
We also received a lot of feedback from this round of testing, and these three points led to some of the bigger changes made to our prototype.
Wishlist for Sellers
Users could not locate each store’s wishlist, so we added a “What to Bring” section to the homepage for quick access.
Quality Tags
Item Deselection
Before
After
DESIGN & EVALUATION (HIGH-FI)
After two rounds of user testing, we finalized our design and tried to incorporate as much feedback as possible.
To see the full prototype and how our solution improves the transaction process between employees and sellers, please refer to the overview section.
REFLECTION (WHAT WE DID WELL)
The three key successes from this project…
Our team achieved great success, winning first place among all UX projects. The following are the key reasons I believe we reached that level of success.
Understanding All Perspectives
We went out of our way to get in touch with resale and donation center employees, giving us insights from all sides of the secondhand clothing cycle.
Exploration of Ideas
Instead of settling on initial ideas, we spent lots of time brainstorming and testing different solutions to find the best fit for our users’ needs.
Having Iterative Feedback
We conducted several critique rounds with classmates, using their feedback to simplify our design, fix flaws, and strengthen overall usability.
REFLECTION (LESSONS LEARNED)
The three main lessons from this project…
Our team achieved great success, winning first place among all UX projects. The following are the key reasons I believe we reached that level of success.
Testing with Real Employees
More Design Research
Platform Format Exploration
If we had more time and easier access to store employees, we would test our prototype with actual store employees to gather real feedback from primary users instead of relying on classmates simulating their roles.
We could conduct deeper research into how similar apps work, especially those with comparable features, to evaluate whether our design aligns with user expectations and established industry standards.
There was ongoing debate about whether our solution should be a website or an app. This question came up multiple times during user testing and could be explored further to determine the most best platform for our users.
REFLECTION (TEAM WORK)
The three reasons our team worked so well…
A large part of this project's success was due to my teammates. This was one of the best teams I have ever worked with, and I want to highlight the reasons why we worked so effectively together.
Clear Responsibilities
We had a shared Google Sheet with clear responsibilities and deadlines. Everyone consistently delivered their work on time and with high quality.
Being Respectful
We encouraged open communication, actively listened to each other’s ideas, and made sure every voice was considered in our decision-making.
Being Understanding
We were supportive and understanding of one another. If someone was sick or had a busy week, others willingly stepped in to help.