Case Study: Fashion Revolution Week France
UX/UI Challenge: event micro-site
August 2020 -7 days
With: Sahar Mohammadi (remote team)
Tools: Figma, diagram, Mural
Fashion Revolution is a global movement founded on April 24, 2013, the day of the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh.
Each year, each of the 89 member countries holds a week of presentations and workshops with designers and brands to raise awareness of their vision:
“We love fashion. But we don’t want our clothes to exploit people or destroy our planet.”
The goal of the project is to create a micro-site for the annual event in France.
The defined deliverables are a high-fidelity version prototype and a responsive desktop homepage all in english. We designed mobile-first as users often check event’s information on-the-go. (Disclaimer : this is a side-project and not official client work)
Assessment of the current website
A desirability test and users’ interviews of the current global site with 5 French fashionistas interested in sustainable fashion, revealed that the navigation and interface seemed: “technical”, “complex” and “confusing” because of the abundance of information and clickable links. Also: “For a fashion themed website, they missed fashion visuals”.
Therefore, we decided to design a clearer and more desirable site to hold the attention of new fashion visitors and, consequently, to make the next Fashion Revolution Week in Paris an event more accessible to all fashion lovers.
Focus and breathe
When looking at the menu bar of the global site, you can tell Fashion Revolution is addressing 7 different audiences with lots of curated contents. That can trigger confusion:
Our choice to design only for the French Fashion Revolution Week event was not random: worldwide, Fashion Revolution has 89 country members and it’s hard to display all 4 kinds of activities for 10 days (yes, fashion weeks often lasts more than a week).
Our site’s primary aim is to attract visitors to the events. Once they enjoy it and want to know more about the association, they would dive deeper in the global website by signing the manifesto, reading all the blog and industry reports or download the famous poster “Who made my clothes” to post on Instagram.
After looking at the previous event page, with a card sorting workshop, we identified 3 main event categories:
- Open Studios: visiting a designer’s workshop, to understand the full making of garments.
- Workshops: learning to repair your old clothes or giving them a second life with crafts: stitching, dyeing, embroidery, etc.
- Talks: listening to experts about sustainable lifestyles and fashion.
We then came up with a straightforward sitemap with the addition of the essentials for an event: About page, Contact, Newsletter feature and social medias links.
Desirability challenge
To tackle the need for a more desirable interface, we started by creating a mood board to seduce the users with a more relaxed mood, but still inspired by the core goal of the cause: protecting the environment and the people and calling for a change.
Therefore we took inspiration in Natural phenomenons of change like sunrise and erosion : visually soft and smooth, we picked our colors from there. We also call for creation, a feel of harmony and humanity with natural textures and rounded shapes translated in our style tile:
We deliberately chose a brown coffee color instead of the common dark grey for the text body and main fonts color and highlighted the main informations with a palette picked from the earth and the sky.
Hi-fi Wireframes
Testing our new user interface and sitemap
Persona
To test the viability of our new proposition, we created a persona based on common traits and needs of our previous interviewees : Sara the parisian fashionista.
Sara is in her mid-30’s, works in a health start-up in Issy les Moulineaux. She likes to look fashionable, enjoys shopping at Zara because they have the latest affordable trendy clothes. Lately she read a lot about the environmental and social issues of the fast fashion industry and she wants to learn how to be a better fashion consumer.
User flow
Our user flow was designed for Sara’s goal: she is looking for sustainable designers to discover their ethical and environmentally friendly designs by visiting their studios.
Prototype
Let’s take a walk on the Fashion Revolution path of Sara:
Desirability Testing #2
We then ran a new desirability test sessions with 13 users who match our Persona:
The results confirmed that our interface looked “trendy”, “upper class” and “contemporary”.
Responsive
As we defined only 7 days to complete this challenge, we designed the desktop version of the homepage as a preview:
Key learnings
A global organization with political and industry stakes should have dedicated sites for each country where there are represented with content adapted to the cultural background and industry, in their language. As it is curated by locals, the impact can only be more powerful.
Final words
A member of Fashion Revolution France since this year, I was very happy to dedicate my training time to work on a project with a topic that strongly speaks to my values and passion.
For the next steps, I wanted to show this personal project to the French Communication team for feedbacks and iterate and start to run usability testings.
Actually I was informed that the main office in UK is currently designing a micro-site template for each country members and that I’ll be part of the team to populate and deploy it in November.
So stay tuned! And if you also believe that fashion should not cost people and the planet, read and sign our manifesto.✌🏼
Thank you for reading, feel free to comment.
Sources & images credits:
Daily Nue par Tiphaine Guiran
