2024 - Peach Fuzz
Sidewalk Runway - Website - Case Study
Team: Amy Wang
2 Weeks - July 2015
Sidewalk Runway is a website to explore the problem that many people face when shopping online for clothing/accessories: you never really know how things will look on your body. Input your stats to find pictures posted of people with the same stats, look for specific clothing and filter by your stats, follow those with similar shapes and style in clothing!
The Task
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Create a website that explores a problem/area of opportunity for an existing brand (we chose Zappos).
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Working with only one other person, we also had to be very time-conscious.
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Consider brand and API constraints.
My Role
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As there were only two members on this team, my role was not in any one particular area but in the entire project.
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Competitive and comparative analyses, surveys, interviews, KPIs, and business proposal.
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Design studio as well as prototype design in Sketch, organizing pages, prototype in InVision.
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Final presentation with deliverables.
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Delight: The Look Book Blogger area with pop-up purchasing.
Content
Project Proposal
Storyboard
This storyboard depicts a shopper buying an item online and finding that it does not fit their body as expected.
Additionally, the consumer did not realize that there are no returns or exchanges and the item ends up going to the thrift store.
Sidewalk Runway aims to avoid these instances by providing alternative images for shopper’s to consider before purchasing.
Research
PROBLEM
People do not typically know what an item they purchase online will look like on their body type, which causes anxiety over lack of fit, problems with returns, and a large group of people who just don't want to bother purchasing online.
SOLUTION
Create a community of shoppers who are motivated to help one another by uploading images of their purchases.
KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Users uploading pictures of products
Users commenting/website community participation
Repeat users
Users directs to Zappos website
Product purchases from Zappos
Return rates
Feature Comparisons
Layout Comparisons
Technical Research
PLATFORM
Responsive website
Zappos API
http://www.programmableweb.com/api/zappos
DEVELOPMENT CONSIDERATIONS
Through the Zappos API, Sidewalk Runway is able to pull in inventory data such as:
Product name
Product details
Price
From user research, we found that consumers use both desktops and mobile devices when shopping online.
The team met and interviewed two full-stack developers before deciding to pursue a responsive website. Although users would not be able to access their camera on a mobile device (through a responsive site), they are still able to access image libraries in order to upload pictures and browse.
For the Blogger Inspiration page, bloggers would provide their RSS feeds and which would be checked every so often on our end. Bloggers would need to use specific tags (such as “#everythingfromZappos”) so that Sidewalk Runway can filter by those posts in the feeds.
FUTURE VERSIONS
The initial responsive website is meant to keep development efforts low while showing proof of concept. If that is achieved, Sidewalk Runway would move to a native app. This would allow implementation of a barcode scanner for in-person shopping to find further images of an item.
User Research
SURVEY DATA
Surveys were sent out that contained general questions regarding shopping. Of the 58 responses, results show that some of the largest factors influencing shoppers’ purchase decisions are as follows:
Customer reviews on product page (74%)
Official product images (62%)
Recommendations from people (50%)
Seeing item on other people (48%)
Customer images on product page (45%)
This finding validates that visual aids contribute significantly in decision-making for shoppers. Additionally, 60% of survey takers indicated that they have left a review for an item that they’ve purchased. This shows that the majority of consumers have a desire to share their experiences with fellow buyers.
USER INTERVIEWS
We conducted 10 user interviews with both male and female participants between the ages of 24 and 34. Major trends show that:
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7/10 people check out items in store before purchasing online. The top reasons for this is that they often find items for cheaper online and it is difficult to know how a product looks on yourself, even with measurements provided.
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6/10 shoppers do online research on items before deciding to purchase items online. The top reasons being that they are motivated by the priciness of the item and do not trust the official images on the website so they would rather try to find pictures of the items that aren’t staged.
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7/10 Follow some sort of fashion blog or look online for fashion advice, mainly for inspiration, especially if the people are similarly shaped or have similar styles.
Personas
Primary
Secondary
Tertiary
Designing the Site
After creating the personas, we figured out our feature prioritization in terms of what the users want/need, and what we could reasonably provide.
We created a user journey to keep track of our goal.
We then created the sitemap to keep it cohesive and began our design studio.
Initial Designs
Iterations and Final Design
Homepage
Result
Next Steps
FILTERS & SEARCH IMPROVEMENTS
Sidewalk Runway's goal is to help shoppers make purchase decisions by providing easy ways to search and filter images. The following additions are further improvements:
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Filter bloggers and/or their models by size
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Include additional sizes and body shapes
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Ability to filter metric unit choice (cm, inches, etc.).
FEATURES
Add a ‘Suggested Items’ feature that helps to pair items depending on if they’ve been paired before/bought together (using member information as well as APIs)
Add a ‘Similar Items’ feature that allows users to find similar items to ones the are looking at/for that may cost less, as price was a big issue for almost all of the people that we surveyed
Show additional color options for the same item
Allow ‘following’ a brand in addition to users
FUTURE
Create a native iOS and Android application so that users can easily upload images using the camera on their devices. This would also allow for incorporation of a barcode scanner feature that allows in-person shoppers to scan items at a store to see all of the pictures associated with it.