Alyssa Boutelle
PROJECT
The INSEAD Product Games competition 2020 focused on designing a product to promote one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
I worked in the role of design strategist, leading our market research and feature prioritization efforts. The team was led by my MMM program classmate whose expertise is in sustainability operations and joined by a UX design consultant.
Our team designed a product which would empower shoppers to easily purchase high-quality secondhand clothes instead of new clothes, reducing landfill waste from fashion.
challenge
the prompt
How might we develop a killer product that can help people move from sustainability awareness, to action, to adoption of a sustainable habit?
our solution
We can ease the burden of search and discovery associated with secondhand clothes shopping to empower customers who want to shop more sustainably more frequently.
research process
surveys and on-the-street feedback
Our initial survey (n=153) validated the intention-action gap related to buying secondhand clothes among our target market, and interviews (n= 9) outside of a local consignment shop and standard clothing retailer uncovered key pain points in the customer journey.
Key insight: it's the unsorted volume of secondhand clothing that overwhelms good intentions. If we can make search and discovery easier, a shopper will be more likely to actually purchase secondhand.
PERSONA development
I led the development of key personas within our target market based on psychographic characteristics, enabling us to work on our prototype to solve for a specific set of pain points.
customer perception experiment
To understand what our customers considered "a good match" between different clothing choices, I designed a survey (n= 129) called The Jacket Experiment which asked respondents to a) rank the qualities they care most about when considering a clothing purchase and b) rate the alikeness of four different jackets in comparison to a baseline option. We used this feedback to generate the content displayed on our prototype.
Key insight: shoppers trust their own perception of a picture the most, even more than perfect text matches. Using a combination of image-matching technologies and data scraping will serve up the most satisfying matches.
prototype a/b testing
In live prototype interviews (n= 22), we showed users several versions of the browser extension pop-up layout, using their feedback to inform how much and which pieces of information should be included when displaying a secondhand clothing option to a shopper.
rejected hypotheses
accepted hypotheses
Solution
Benefact(or) is a browser extension that automatically matches a shopper's desired clothing purchase with available secondhand clothing items on a trusted reseller website.
Our product took 1st place out of 45 submissions, with the judges particularly praising how well our solution fit the brief of enabling a sustainable habit and the rigor and breadth of our user feedback testing.
Benefact(or) has become Beni! Our team leader, Sarah Pinner, co-founded and is now the full-time CEO of Beni - download it here to find more sustainable secondhand clothes while shopping on over 1000 brand websites.
