Background

Fashion Party is a side venture of Limeroad which mainly deals with reselling the products by their users at the comfort of their homes by keeping their own margins of profits.

Learn more about what Fashion Party does.

I redesigned the Fashion Party app. All by myself.

This was my first project at Limeroad and while working on Fashion Party, I was working with a team of 1 product manager, 1 android developer, 1 backend developer, 1 QA engineer and a team of business analysts and marketing.

While redesigning the app, I was able to achieve the following milestones:

• Complete Redesign. I completely redesigned the app in 30 days.

• Improved usability across the platform. No usability tests were conducted by the external consultancy before the dev handoff for the earlier version. Since I was completely in charge of designing the app, I saw to it that the final designs matched my visuals.

• Implemented a new design language. Introduced the use of gradients and floating navbar in the design and also included new onboarding screens.

The Process

The design process behind the Fashion Party app was a tricky one. Given that I was tasked to redesign the entire app in a given time frame, it left me no choice but to omit out my user research of actually talking to the stakeholders. To compensate for this, I studied the market apps and did my market research noting down the user journeys of the competition. The rest of the details (qualitative data) as what the users expect from the app was provided to me by the marketing team, whereas the quantitative data was provided by the business analysts.

Approaching the Problem

When it came to the redesign of the fashion party app, not much research was to be done on my part, as the skeleton already existed and the backend code for most of the features was already written for the app. As the problem demanded more UI work, so my research was based on how to make the UI more appealing as compared to the competition.

Our main competitors included companies like:

• Meesho

• Gloworad (android only)

• Shop 101

After researching the Competition, I realised that what was lacking was a proper user journey to let the user create a collection of items that they wanted to resell and check for the details. Some either lacked the very basic steps to allow the user to navigate the app and then proceed towards account creation, whereas some were just packed with features that put a lot of cognitive load on users as to what they needed to do with the app. (It included options like to resell, buy or even buy new products, which in my opinion defeated the whole purpose of branding itself as a reselling app). This can be seen in the images below:

• Going through the Meesho app journey, I noticed that there was no option for the user to create their personal collection to resell later, not until they signed up. Also, Meesho had two ways to view the categories, either through the top rails provided at the top of the homepage or through the categories tab present in the bottom navbar. Repetition of the same elements in the same visual space seemed unnecessary to me. Same goes for the user icon which is present at both the top of the homepage and n the navbar.

• Going through the shop 101 user journey I noticed that the user cannot even browse through the collections the app had to offer not unless they create an account. This seemed pretty restricting to me and once you signup, the entire real estate was cramped with details leaving very little breathing space for elements.

So in order to approach the redesign of the fashion party app, I decided to fix these issues whilst redesigning the app by keeping a similar visual design language as these apps had. So I decided to stick to a similar colour scheme.

Designs

Here I will be sharing with you the user journey of the create collections and detailing my design decisions behind it.

 Screen 1 is how the homepage of the fashion party app looked like. This is is the final version of the page after multiple iterations, which shows the top rails of the topmost featured items and then shows a pre-made collection of different items of a particular segment (here Kurtis). One section consisted of 3 vertical images giving the users a glimpse of what that collection had to offer, with its average rating given by the users that have bought it, also showing the details below it. The share button was provided so that the user could share it directly from the homepage.
The bottom nav bar was redesigned with new icons and a centrally located “brush” icon which was used to create a new collection. This was the design differentiator when compared to other apps as none of them featured a dedicated button to create a new collection.

Screen 2 showed the screen where the user could view the collection they desired and alter it as per their needs. The design differentiator here was the introduction of the top sliding rail, which divided the results per price and materials for easy selection for the user. Another UX point that I kept in mind while redesigning this was the relocation of the filter and sort tabs to the bottom of the screen as it is more accessible there. Screen 3 showed the expanded menu when tapping the share button. This was made available across major screens as it was the selling point of the app.

Screen 4 provided a glimpse of the visual information page (VIP) which offered the same set of items in the collection that the user had made (showing affordance so that the user could slide through different images), giving the user to buy that by selecting size without having to dive deep into the details which could be accessed by scrolling up the screen.

 Results and Takeaways

• Competition analysis did the trick. It was important for this project to launch as quickly as possible and with very little qualitative data to work with, a quick competition analysis did the job of finding out the best design solution to our project.

• Design thinking is key to effective products. My hack for the design framework helped me come up with solutions quickly as the general/traditional way of research was not possible in these trying times.

• A combination of Agile and Lean delivers products. Due to the nature of the AGILE process, a lot of mistakes were made during the designing the screens, and I would love to you through all of those failed attempts to design (it consists of hundreds of discarded screens because of lack of following the proper research process).