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Jumpsuit is a pre-seed startup that aims to make personal style coaching more accessible through a mobile app experience. Elyse Holladay, the founder of Jumpsuit, runs her own style coaching business. She helps her clients identify areas where they struggle with expressing their style, understand what causes those struggles, and then implement actionable steps to change their behaviors and habits around their style, so that they can achieve their personal style goals and express themselves in the way that makes them most happy and confident.
Jumpsuit's mobile app aims to take the teachings from her style coaching program and make it more accessible to a wider audience by providing bite-size, daily activities users can do to develop their own personal sense of style, at a lower cost than traditional style coaching. The app is still under development, currently in the MVP stage.
I was hired by Elyse in April 2021 as a product generalist. Initially, I helped conduct competitive analysis for Jumpsuit and the launch of the Jumpsuit pilot program. After the pilot program, we had collected enough user data to work on an MVP for the product, so my tasks became product design oriented, and I was able to create mid-fidelity mockups of the core task flow for users of Jumpsuit's future mobile app.
This project is still on-going, with plans to flesh out the rest of the user flows and create a high-fidelity prototype of the app that can be utilized in future user testing. That being said, the focus of this case study is on the UX research that I conducted following the pilot program, along with the insights I gleaned from user research, and the mockups I was able to create using the data from user interviews.
Because my role initially was somewhat undefined, I didn't start this project with a pre-planned process of design. Instead, I worked on whatever needed doing, and over time an over-arching design process revealed itself. Interestingly enough, this process ended up following methodology that I typically follow, which starts with collecting background information about the product, target customers, and competitors, ideation and synthesis following that, and finally actual design, prototyping, and testing. In the case of Jumpsuit, the overview of the current process is as follows:
IDEATION
In the context of Jumpsuit, the goal of this phase was to gain a better understanding of existing solutions in the fashion-tech style coaching space, identify unaddressed problems or pain points, and then propose possible solutions that Jumpsuit potentially could provide.
RESEARCH:
Following the ideation phase and the generation of various hypotheses, we wanted to test our ideas with real users. This research phase involved launching and running a paid pilot program, conducting user interviews, and then analyzing the results and key learnings.
DESIGN:
After getting feedback from users, we created a list of prioritized features to include in the MVP, which I then used to start making mid-fidelity wireframes of what the Jumpsuit app may look like.
The initial stage of this project consisted of brainstorming and market research. There are two main areas that Jumpsuit targets: fashion and style coaching and habit building. For the former, competitors include apps like Stylebook and Cladwell, but also products like Instagram and Pinterest; Stylebook and Cladwell help users create outfit ideas based on the items in their closets, while Instagram and Pinterest are often used to get inspiration for new outfits and to see what other people are wearing, or what's trendy. On the other hand, habit building apps aim to induce behavioral change in users, such as Headspace, which aims to help users maintain a daily meditation practice, or Duolingo, which pushes users to complete a language lesson each day. Despite Jumpsuit's focus on fashion, its actual structure is more similar to habit building apps, as the core principle is for users to build daily habits that help them develop and understand their personal style.
Given this, I conducted a two-prong approach to the competitive analysis, and looked at both habit-building and fashion-related apps. Current fashion apps on the market, such as Stylebook and Cladwell tend to promise users great insights about their style, but often fall short according to user reviews. Both incorporate shopping experiences into the app, which encourages users to buy more clothes rather than address the root of their style frustrations. In addition, many user reviews noted that it was "overwhelming" or "too much work" to manually enter all the clothing items in their closet into these apps when first starting out; as this is a requirement to use the outfit generation features in both these apps, it creates a high barrier of entry for new users. The UX in Cladwell is more clean and user-friendly than in Stylebook, which is severely outdated and somewhat frustrating to use.
In contrast, habit-building apps such as Noom, Headspace, and Duolingo have daily habit loops that draw users to engage with the app regularly, and the UX is overall very sleek and pleasing to use. Because these sorts of apps have activities that users must do every day, habit building apps also concentrate heavily on gamification and reducing mental load in order to boost user engagement. Lessons and exercises are broken up into bite-sized activities that take no longer than 5-10 minutes to complete, allowing users to easily integrate these apps into their regular routines.
Because habit-building is so critical to Jumpsuit's core experience, we wanted to explore this aspect more fully. We wanted to determine whether a mobile app could enable behavioral change in users to the point of getting users to reflect on their personal style and practice style-conscious habits regularly. Could we help users build consistent style habits? Perhaps more importantly, could we make "high effort" activities, such as daily outfit logging and outfit reflections or style exercises, feel low effort and fun enough to effectively compete for attention with other low effort activities, such as scrolling through social media?
Since Elyse had already been running her personal style coaching business for some time, she had insights into how potential users might feel, and where they may be struggling with personal style. Using these insights, we were able to formulate several hypotheses about the average likely Jumpsuit user:
Users want a better, more efficient, effective way to approach personal style.
Users want to dress in a way that's appropriate to their lifestyle, budget, and aesthetic.
Users are open to trying a non-video / non-course format that is part of their day to day life to achieve their style goals.
Users want quick on-the-go tips that are quickly digestible and easy to do or implement in their own life, in a seamless way.
Users want recommendations on how to dress.
Users are willing to pay for the value of dressing better and coaching to gain self confidence.
We decided to test these questions and assumptions through running a pilot program, which would emulate the app experience. In some sense, this pilot program was a pre-MVP — we aimed to create a mobile-based program that would be as similar as possible to what a real app would be like, without doing any sort of app development and using only third party tools.
Our goal was to get 20-25 people to sign up for the pilot program, which would take place over three weeks. The program had a fee of $45 — there to validate whether or not potential users would be willing to pay for style coaching. In total, we were able to get 19 participants for the program, which was close to our initial goal.
From the pilot, we most wanted to learn how much effort users felt that the program activities took, whether users felt they were getting something valuable out of the program, and where (if at all) users stopped engaging with the program. Additionally, we were particularly interested measuring user engagement in the daily outfit log activity, which formed the core of the program and provided personal insights to each participant about their personal style. Would users consistently keep up with this habit each day? If not, what was preventing them from consistently completing it?
During the setup phase, Elyse prepared the program content. At the same time, I created surveys and quizzes in Typeform, and used ConvertKit and Community to schedule program emails and text messages, respectively. Most of the Typeform activities were meant to emulate short polls or personality tests that might be presented to users in an actual mobile app, if the app were real, although a few of the Typeform surveys asked for feedback about the program and overall experience. Text messages were meant to emulate push notifications, and emails were reserved for weekly newsletters, used to introduce the theme of the week and provide an overview of the week's activities.
Each week of the program had a particular theme or focus. In the first week, participants were asked to observe their style habits and frustrations, and then begin practicing the daily outfit log exercise. The concept of style being a habit, not a purchase also was introduced in the first week. Outfit logging continued into the second week, along with exercises on observing style patterns from daily wear and building awareness of self-talk. The program wrapped up in the third week with activities to encourage reflection on participants' individual style, identification of barriers to implementing their style, and creation of specific style goals to incorporate into their own lives.
At the end of the program, we asked users to submit their feedback in one last Typeform survey. Out of the 17 people who completed the program, 10 of them filled out the ending survey. From the responses, there were two very important quantitative takeaways: 60% of participants said that they learned lots of new insights about their style habits, 40% said they learned a few new insights, and no participant said that they learned nothing new. When asked if they had gained a better sense of their style after the program, 70% said yes, 30% said somewhat, and 0% no. These two distributions are extremely promising, as they show that the program had a positive impact on users, by imparting personal style insights and helping to define participants' sense of style.
This graph shows that 70% of survey respondents who participated in the pilot program left it with a better sense of their current sense of style.
This graph shows that 60% of survey respondents in the pilot program found that it helped them gain new insights about their own behaviors relating to their style.
The survey also yielded more qualitative insights; we learned that participants enjoyed the daily outfit logging and text reminders the most overall. Participants commented that the outfit log helped them gain clarity into the reality of what they were wearing vs. what they wished they wore, gave them a structure to reflect on their outfits, and articulate the patterns they noticed over time in their outfits. The text messages helped them stay engaged — they liked being able to get feedback on outfits from Elyse — and the daily notifications made thinking about their style a larger part of their daily routines.
I was able to interview 7 participants. The goal of these interviews was to learn more about what participants liked and disliked about the pilot program, what their style frustrations and pain points are in general, what they've previously tried in regards to learning about and defining their personal style, and what they imagined their ideal solution for their problems to be. All interviewed were conducted over Zoom, and recorded. I also used Otter to transcribe the sessions, so it would be easier to highlight quotes and insights later on.
After completing all the interviews, I summarized my findings and shared them with Elyse. We then conducted an affinity mapping exercise, sorting key participant quotes into the following categories: daily outfit logging, an outfit gallery, reflection exercises, notifications, mobile app comments, wins, and general insights. From the user comments that we reviewed in this exercise, we were able to generate a preliminary list of important insights that would affect the direction of Jumpsuit's MVP:
Users need the ability to take (or upload) a photo of their daily outfits.
Users need to be able to rate how they felt about their daily outfit, preferably to be done on the same day that they wear the outfit.
Users want to see a collection of their worn outfits and ratings over a certain period of time (e.g. last week, last month, etc.)
Users like to have deeper and more-involved reflection exercises that help them gain personalized insights into their style and habits, but prefer these to occur infrequently (e.g. monthly or quarterly).
Given the insights from our affinity mapping, we created a list of features to include in the first iteration of the MVP:
a way for users to take a daily outfit photo
the ability to review daily outfit photos on the same day
somewhere for users to view a collection or gallery of their outfit photos and ratings
From here, I put together task flows that defined how users could accomplish each of these actions:
These are the task flows for three functions that customers indicated would be important to them in a style help app.
With these flows in mind, I started working on wireframes for a few screens that formed the user flow for daily outfit logging, a core experience of the future Jumpsuit app. I started by defining the goals a user would have for this particular task, and then drew some low-fidelity sketches to get a better idea of how to structure each screen. From there, I used Figma to make mid-fidelity wireframes of the three essential screens involved in the outfit logging activity — both the sketches and the wireframes are shown below.
Here are low-fidelity sketches of the core screens that support outfit logging functionality.
These are the mid-fidelity wireframes of the three outfit logging core screens.
Overall, the pilot program that we ran was quite successful and validated several of our original hypotheses: we confirmed that users are willing to pay to learn how to dress according to their personal style, that they are open to trying a daily exercise format of style coaching, and that users want tips and activities that are quickly digestible and easy to seamlessly apply in their daily life. The feedback that we gained from the program survey and user interviews provided several actionable insights into which features we should include in the MVP of Jumpsuit's mobile app, and also supported several of our hypotheses from the beginning of this project.
User needs heavily influence the development of the MVP, so it is very beneficial that we have been able to get so much feedback from users already. I anticipate that this trend will continue throughout further product development steps, enabling us to incorporate user needs and solutions to pain points as we build the product.
As of November 2021, this project is still in progress. With the mid-fidelity wireframes done, the next step is to expand upon the feature set, define core task flows for the MVP, create more wireframes, and then eventually mock up a high-fidelity interactive prototype that can be used for usability testing and customer feedback. I plan to update this case study as more progress is made, so check back later for additional content!