WearWise

Case Study

Duration

2025 - 2025

This case study explores the design process behind WearWise, a sustainable fashion app created to streamline the sourcing of eco-friendly clothing for boutique owners. The platform was designed to simplify the process of discovering, ordering, and managing sustainable clothing inventory, ensuring an efficient and seamless experience for boutique owners like Lily Chen.

As the UI/UX Designer on this project, I led the design process from user research to high-fidelity prototypes. My goal was to understand the specific pain points boutique owners face in the sustainable fashion industry, such as sourcing reliable eco-friendly suppliers and managing complex inventory logistics, and to translate these insights into an intuitive and user-centered design.

Tools

Pencil & Paper

Figma

Design Principles

User Research

Usability Testing

Case Study

Your boutique deserves an eco-friendly upgrade

Running a sustainable boutique shouldn’t be a struggle. Whether you’re trying to find reliable eco-friendly suppliers or navigating through outdated platforms, the challenges can feel overwhelming.

Our sustainable fashion app is here to solve these pain points. Here’s how it simplifies and enhances the experience for boutique owners like Lily.

Understanding The Problem & Users

The core challenge was to streamline the process of discovering and ordering eco-friendly clothing for boutique owners, which encompasses a range of related tasks. This includes navigating outdated supplier platforms, verifying sustainability certifications, managing bulk orders, and ensuring timely delivery. Instead of making assumptions and jumping straight into ideation, I focused on understanding the end-to-end experience of boutique owners in this space. By gathering insights through user interviews and research, I aimed to ensure that the concept would be practical, effective, and valuable for boutique owners like Lily Chen.

Persona Development

To create the persona for the Eco-Boutique Enthusiast, I reflected on user pain points discovered through research and how they align with the needs of small business boutique owners. These pain points highlighted challenges in sourcing eco-friendly clothing and managing the logistics of operating a sustainable boutique.

While no formal interviews were conducted, key insights were drawn from secondary research and user trends in the sustainable fashion industry.

Ordering sustainable clothing and managing boutique inventory emerged as recurring pain points for boutique owners, highlighting sustainability, convenience, and reliability as critical needs. Users seek a seamless experience that supports their ethical business goals, along with trustworthy product certifications and a platform that simplifies communication with suppliers.

Boutique owners consistently prioritize finding clothing that aligns with their sustainability and ethical sourcing values, emphasize the need to streamline operations through efficient browsing, ordering, and shipment tracking, and maintain a strong emotional connection to their work by ensuring their efforts have a positive impact on customers and the environment.

Hierarchical Task Analysis/User Journey Map

My next step was to map out how Lily Chen, our primary persona, interacts with the tasks involved in her boutique operations. The goal of this exercise was to understand the journey Lily currently experiences and identify opportunities to improve her workflow through thoughtful design.

The journey map focuses on Lily’s central tasks—browsing sustainable clothing, filtering products, adding items to her cart, placing orders, and tracking shipments—while capturing both positive emotions (excitement, relief) and negative emotions (frustration, indecisiveness) at each stage, thus pinpointing where design improvements can enhance satisfaction and alleviate pain points. Each stage also includes opportunities to refine the user experience, ensuring the app effectively meets Lily’s needs.

Proposed User Flow

For Lily Chen's sustainable fashion app, I proposed a single user flow that simplifies browsing, selecting, and purchasing eco-friendly clothing. This flow addresses core pain points like poor navigation, lack of transparency, and inefficient checkout processes.

The flow guides users from opening the app to tracking their shipment, incorporating decision points for browsing categories, applying filters, and reviewing products.

Sketching w/ Pen & Paper - Low Fidelity Design

Entering the design phase, I kept in mind everything I had collected so far - personas, their pain points, and the new flows. I started visualizing stuff by roughly sketching out concepts.

Low-Fidelity (Digital) Wireframes

In this phase, my emphasis was put on visual consistency and how my interface and interaction could serve the core functionalities.

High-Fidelity Wireframes

The high-fidelity wireframes were designed to be visually appealing and user-friendly, with a focus on enhancing the overall user experience. The design process involved several iterations, incorporating feedback from usability testing to refine the interface and interactions.

Prototyping The User Flow

Figma's prototyping feature allowed me to map out multiple user flows based on specific actions taken throughout the application, helping visualize and optimize the user experience.

High-Fidelity Wireframes & Mini-Branding

When designing the visual style for WearWise, I focused on creating an aesthetic that aligns with the brand's sustainable and user-centric mission. The design had to feel clean, modern, and approachable while supporting the core purpose of showcasing eco-friendly clothing without overshadowing the products themselves.

The branding incorporates a minimalist color palette of black and neutral tones, representing sustainability and balance. The typography (Inter) in bold and regular weights, ensures readability and a contemporary look that complements the app's clean interface. Accent colors subtly guide the user through actions like filtering or checking out without overwhelming the experience.

WearWise emphasizes simplicity in its UI to allow the clothing—the true star of the platform—to shine. Micro-interactions and engaging elements, like fluid transitions and visual feedback on actions, create a delightful and seamless user experience. By maintaining a delicate balance between function and inspiration, the design reflects WearWise’s commitment to sustainable shopping in a digital age.