Hilmi
An application tailored for fashion designers
Project Brief
Our team of four UX designers worked with Hilmi, a company dedicated to empowering smaller-scale fashion brands. Hilmi sought to enhance the fashion design process so that smaller brands could effectively compete with industry leaders. Our UX team took on the responsibility of developing an AI-based application aimed at meeting this objective.
Skills & Tools
Project Management
User Interview
Affinity Mapping
Comparative Analysis
Persona Development
Wireframing
User Flows
Sketching
Prototyping
Role & Timeline
Co-Project Manager and Research Lead | February 13, 2024 - March 5, 2024
Research
As research lead for Hilmi, I formulated a three prong approach to this project’s research plan. This plan included a comparative/competitive analysis, secondary research, and user interviews.
Comparative/Competitive Analysis
As you can see in the below chart, we compared a few different industry tools like Illustrator, CLO, CALA and TailorNova in a competitive/comparative analysis to really hone in on any features we’d like to include or stray away from for Hilmi. We also wanted to see what features other tools did not have that we could implement to ensure we’re competitive in the current market.
Secondary Research
We conducted secondary research to understand AI’s role and impact on fashion. According to McKinsey & Company, “generative AI could add $150 billion, conservatively, and up to $275 billion to the apparel, fashion, and luxury sectors’ operating profits.”
Resources
2. McKinsey & Company
User Interviews
To really empathize with users of this tool, we reached out to seven individuals with concrete experience in the fashion design industry. We crafted strategic questions for users to feel comfortable enough to share insights pain points we could use to define the problem in this space and then solve these problems using Hilmi.
Research Synthesis
Following our interviews, we synthesized our research using an affinity map as seen below.
We then came to highlight the three largest pain points as a result of our combined research.
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Adapting and utilizing the power of AI is essential to business growth
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Collaboration in real time is important
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There needs to be a space for inspiration from peers and environment
Problem Statement
Fashion designers need an innovative digital tool to streamline, collaborate and inspire since the current design process limits designers to an inefficient workflow.
Ideation
User Personas
Using the data gathered from our various forms of research, we created user personas to help our team better understand Hilmi’s target audience. This would help us make more informed decisions throughout the design and development process.
How Might We's
After we delineated the user flows we’d like to prioritize for the platform, we focused on what we’d like to designate as target areas for the application.
To hone in on target areas, we performed a “How Might We” exercise where our team brainstormed a variety of ways we could resolve user frustrations.
The most important pain points we targeted include the following:
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How might we speed up the design process?
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How might we enable the “little guy” to compete with larger brands?
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How might we create a collaborative community?
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How might we create tech packs?
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How might we incorporate AI?
User Flows
We created user flows to act as a blueprint or roadmap when designing Hilmi.
Having the ability to show a “story” in the prototype would be the most effective way to show and justify the features we decided to implement into the application.
As you can see in the user flow diagram, users have the option to navigate through three flows.
Sketching
Once we formed a vision of what the application needs to achieve in order to solve the overarching problem, we started to ideate on how the platform should look through a group sketching exercise.
We prioritized sketching for the community page, dashboard page and tech pack creation page.
Community Page
Wireframing
Following the sketching, we further iterated on our ideas by creating low to mid-fidelity wireframes. These wireframes are a culmination of our team’s ideas and inspired by common fashion as well as user experience industry tools like Illustrator and Figma.
Community Page
Usability Testing
To ensure our wireframes are on the right track to success, we conducted five usability tests with fashion designers.
As as result of our wireframe usability tests, we discovered the below insights:
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The home button was not always clear visibly, so it led to a number of confusion (as shown in the images below)
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There is a need for clarification and description boxes
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The community page was a great idea, but it wasn’t always clear on how to navigate to or use it
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It was not intuitive to close out of the modal
Final Prototype
Following the usability testing and iterations, we present to you the below high-fidelity prototype.
Next Steps & Takeaways
Due to the limited time constraints to produce this prototype, there are definitely aspects we were not able to execute. Below please see a few next steps we foresee for Hilmi to become the best application it can be for fashion designers.
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Build out the collaborative workspace pages
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Incorporate mood board and personalization features
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Further explore accessibility options and innovative tool sets
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Conduct more usability testing to continue iteration on ease of use
For this client facing project, we reflected on the following key takeaways.
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Clarify expectations and continue to communicate throughout the campaign
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Emphasize the importance of and work with client on sourcing qualifying interview participants as the research plays a huge role in identifying pain points and ideating solutions
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