Project Summary
Venus’ Closet is an e-commerce platform designed to centralize various shopping vendors and create a more personalized and efficient experience for people with disabilities seeking adaptive clothing.
Contribution
Research, Design, Wireframing, Prototyping
Team
4x Designers
Duration
Winter 2023, 3 months
Type
UMich Innovation in Action
Tools
Figma
| OVERVIEW
What is Venus’ Closet?
Venus’ Closet is a tool that assists disabled individuals with shopping for adaptive clothing. Adaptive clothing refers to garments that have been specifically designed for people with physical limitations. This e-commerce platform helps centralize the various shopping vendors for disabled individuals to create a more personalized and efficient experience.
E-commerce shopping is a popular medium to shop online for clothing and other necessities. But is this something easily navigable for the disability community?
Accessibility is a prominent concern and resources often do not meet the needs of these individuals. So, what struggles do disabled individuals face when finding and purchasing adaptive clothing online?
The Problem
Our Goal
The disability community struggles to navigate current e-commerce platforms to find/purchase clothing that fits their physical and fashion needs.
How might we provide an inclusive, digital solution for this community?
| DESK RESEARCH
Disabled individuals struggle to find clothing that meets their basic necessities.
How did our team determine that the lack of adaptive clothing was a challenge the disability community faces? According to the (CDC), up to 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. have some type of disability. Despite making up a large population of the United States, the disability community remains one that is ostracized from society.
In discussion, our team established current struggles such as accessibility (i.e. mobility, vision, etc.) for individuals who shop online and brainstormed what disabled individuals might face on a daily basis.
For example, many individuals face:
hearing loss
vision loss
memory difficulties
…which can prevent them from easily navigating a computer or mobile device; however, we noticed another common challenge: mobility.
| COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
So what about mobility & existing e-commerce clothing platforms?
Disabled individuals with mobility difficulties are affected in various ways, from walking to dressing themselves. Mobility not only affects those who require an assistive device or wheelchair but also those with vision and hearing loss. From this common challenge, our team directed our focus toward the current landscape of clothing for the disability community: adaptive clothing. We began by looking at existing e-commerce platforms that offer clothing for disabled individuals to discover what was on the market and if it was, or has been, useful to this community.
Silverts
| KEY TAKEAWAYS
Izadaptive
Tommy Hilfiger
Unfortunately, existing brands did not have resourceful options for adaptive clothing.
→ Existing brands did not have many adaptive clothing options for individuals with various disabilities (or combination of disabilities).
→ From the few selections of adaptive clothing available, most were not fashionable.
→ Disconnect between the price and quality of adaptive clothing, where high-quality adaptive clothing was expensive and unaffordable.
| USER INTERVIEWS
“I think disabled people have to give up a lot when choosing fashionable clothing because there aren’t a lot of options.”
After initial desk research, my team and I directly communicated with individuals of our target audience. Speaking to individuals at Michigan Medicine and the Disability Network in Washtenaw, we conducted semi-structured user interviews. Doing these interviews helped us gain a rich understanding of the perceptions, motivations, and opinions about adaptive clothing and shopping online of individuals within the disability community.
To discover the disability community’s overall perceptions, motivations, and opinions, a few questions we asked were:
→ What do you think of when you hear the word fashion?
→ How does cost play a factor in your decision-making process when purchasing clothing? If yes, to what extent?
→ How does your disability affect the way you find and purchase clothing?
Timeline
Description
| KEY INSIGHTS
- affinity diagram of interviewee quotes organized into several themes (mentioned below)
Disabled individuals wish to have the same options for clothing as any other person.
→ Disabled individuals wished to have more options for clothing that combine their physical and fashion needs
→ Disabled individuals wished to express their identity through individual fashion choices and normalize their disabilities
→ Disabled individuals’ general willingness to try new brands for adaptive clothing did not reflect the difficulty of having to find adaptive clothing online
| THE PERSONAS
Emily & Julie Smith
With a better understanding of the disability community’s needs, here’s what we found to be the most valuable in their journey of finding and purchasing clothing online:
Disabled individuals also rely heavily on their caregivers. As a result, caregivers were an integral part of our design, and being able to develop a solution that both users would be able to have an improved experience is what we considered in each persona.
Emily encompasses disabled individuals with mobility difficulties who go throughout their daily lives with additional tasks.
On the other hand, Julie is Emily’s mother who wants to accommodate her daughter as much as she can when it comes to finding clothing that fits her needs.
Emily’s struggles and Julie’s efforts
In order to highlight the struggles that each persona might face, it was important for us to consider Emily and Julie’s pain points in relation to each other and certain tasks they might accomplish. By highlight their story through a journey map and storyboard we could focus on the current state of the user and identify points of friction as they navigate an online shopping platform.
Emily is tech-savvy and is familiar with shopping online so highlighting an experience on Amazon where selections are not as clear helped us identify specific pain points for younger disabled individuals.
Julie is a mother who is always looking out for her daughter’s likes/dislikes so she would like to do anything she can to help her daughter fit into the clothes she is wearing. The storyboard helped us illustrate how she might go about altering clothes for Emily in cases where sizes were too large and similarly identifies the pain points clearly as a story.
| USER JOURNEY + STORYBOARD
| THE SOLUTION
Core Experiences
Pre-survey to build an individual shopping profile
Builds an individual profile for the user based on their disability and clothing needs.
Collects basic demographic information, disability, and clothing needs, allowing the user to have a curated shopping experience.
Personalized recommendations to tailor the shopper’s personal needs
Personalized recommendation feature uses the information collected from the pre-survey to provide the user with items that fit their preferences.
Users can choose particular styles, sizes, and functions of clothing, enhanced with an additional filter feature
Customization tool to provide additional functionality
Allows the user to personalize their clothing with additional aspects such as color, material, attachment, size, and shape.
Helps tailor their clothing toward ease of dressing and preferred fashion styles.
Venus’ Closet vs. Other e-commerce clothing sites
Compared with other adaptive clothing websites, Venus’ Closet offers:
A central and inclusive experience for its users. Addressing common pain points such as personalized recommendations, free-hassle return policy, and mobile-app convenience, our prototype has the potential to achieve what most other websites could not accomplish for a small but important population of users in the disability community.
| WHAT I LEARNED
Personal Takeaways
Low-fidelity prototypes are ESSENTIAL 🫡
As a UX designer/researcher, I often hear the phrase “You are not the user". This was especially true with Venus’ Closet as I learned how to empathize with the user and how to put myself in the shoes of a disabled individual to best represent their struggles and give them a voice in an everyday conversation about choosing what clothing someone likes.
From start to end, this project heavily involved the design thinking process. Not only did my team and I prototype a solution, but I was also able to learn how to conduct user research and gather detailed insights to support our design. This was the foundation of our final product and helped me understand how bias can influence findings in research.
“You are NOT the user.” 🙅🏻♀️🙅🏻♀️
Low-fidelity prototypes are essential to fleshing out the organization and sequence of tasks a user will go through. Without this step, editing and iterating on a high-fidelity prototype is difficult when trying to make quick changes that come along with additional user feedback.
Journey through design thinking 🚶🏻♀️🚶🏻♀️🚶🏻♀️
Innovation in Action
UMSI Student Exposition
From left to right: Jingting Wang, Vivian Le, Jianxuan Xu
(Part of) My team and I together at the University of Michigan School of Information Student Exposition! We were one of the few undergraduate projects presenting that day :)
From left to right: Vivian Le (me!), Yuxuan Xia, Jingting Wang, Jihong Zhao, Jianxuan Xu
My team and I together after our final presentation at Innovation in Action 2022 at the University of Michigan!
