User Research!

Today has been a very interesting day so far - now we really feel we are progressing in our design objectives! This morning we made our pitch and our succes criteria, which means that we all as a group now know which target group we are focusing on and what we want to achieve with our design.

The Pitch goes as follows:

We are working with teenage girls to make them want to hold on to their clothing longer.

The succes criteria are:

• teenage girls feel personally attached to their clothing
• they take better care of their clothing
• they feel good & cool doing it!

After that, we thought about our stake holders - what are different parties that influence our users (teenage girls) in their behaviour concerning their clothes? Then we went out to talk to those interested parties. We talked to the following people:

Teenage girls (of course!):

we asked them about their shopping behaviour, how they handled their clothing and if there are any pieces of clothing that were special to them. We also asked if they would sometimes borrow clothing or swap it with their friends. Could there be a way to give clothes a more personal value? How easy do they throw old clothing away, and are there reasons for them to hang on to their clothing right now? On the left you see a picture of one of the shops we checked - we're not posting any photo's of our interview subjects on the internet because we promised not to!

Friends & family:

Luckily, most girls were out shopping with either their friend(s) or their mother, so that made it easy for us to talk to those parties as well. Some interesting things were, for example, that teenagers couldn't name their favorite piece of clothing themselves, but then their friends would point out "Well, what about those jeans you wear all the time?" -"Oh, yeah, you're right..." interesting stuff! We still have to think about the why and how etc, we'll get back to you later on that!

Second hand shops, dry cleaners & do-it-yourself shops:

We also talked to some salespeople in 2nd hand shops and the dry cleaners, because we were wondering about teenage customers and what kind of methods they use to handle their own (2nd hand) merchandise - we wanted to see if there was any chance that teenagers could be convinced to use these kind of shops more often, to personalise their clothing for example. On the right is an example of the massive amount of different kinds of buttons the shop provides. You'll have to wait for our results and conclusions for tomorrow, because it still needs a lot of thinking and then some more thinking about. Yes it does! :-)

We also had some nice presentations, especially Anne the User Insight Superwoman got our attention. We're definitely thinking about paying her a little visit between 10 and 11 tomorrow morning to ask her advice about our user research! (and about 15 year-olds, maybe she has a daughter!). We also still want to talk to some fashion students about the value they give to their own clothes and maybe about their customisation habits - we could think of them as our 'extreme users'.