Working together in our group was a success as we all had a good balance of different ideas to incorporate into KALM. In the beginning, we all had the same objective for what we wanted our app to do, however, we all had different visual ideas which lead to a few meetings of amending the design interface.
Instead of allocating roles, we decided to work together so we could all stay on track and help one another using our individual strengths. My strength was analysing and collecting the data in the excel sheet. At the start of our project, I would have thought my strength was the designing process but I soon adapted a skill for data which came as a surprise to myself!
One of the actions that I think we worked well on as a group was the logo. We all had our individual ideas incorporated into the logo; the hanger, the font, the monochrome colour scheme, the recycling triangle and the slogan ‘Recycle, Restyle, Rewear’. As this was one of the first tasks, this inspired us to continue the rest of our project as the five of us.
Our group met regularly as we were all motivated to create our app to the best of our ability. The Adobe XD software was easy to use and anything we were unsure about we researched. Even though we had no knowledge on how to code or programme, we all spent time looking at YouTube tutorials to help us make some of our desired features like a scrolling page.
Originally, we wanted to have the user’s body in the ‘My Wardrobe’ icon so the user and other users could visually see what the outfit would look like on. However, this involved advanced coding and programming that none of us could accomplish. Nevertheless, we didn’t erase this idea and instead, we created separate clothing categories that were in body order.
Another feature we changed was the purpose of the ‘Starred’ tab. Initially, we agreed to save our favourite outfits made for us into this feature, but after playing through the prototype, we felt that the outfits were quite repetitive. So to replace this, we changed the meaning of ‘starred’ to favouriting a swap shop item as this seems better for the user experience.
One task we did do separately was our presentation slides. The information was already completed as a group but we thought it was best to divide the slides so everyone could be familiar with what they need to present.
If we were to do our app again, we would improve the ‘Style Me’ tab to make it private for users so only their friends can see their wardrobe. We would also add seasonal clothing categories and install a calendar feature so users can plan what day they want to wear their outfit.
Presenting our app was successful and I think that the pitch showed how we worked well together as a group. The constructive feedback we received was noted and we agreed that the points made would all be great for future developments. One point made was to extend our target audience to all ages as the app would appeal to more people than just 18-30. Another point was to commercialise our app further and expand on our data collection by including clothing brands that are being swapped. This would be helpful to our company’s data collection because we will be able to see what clothing brands are most popular. We could also add a clothing brand filter to the swap shop search so that the user’s preferences are accounted for.
Recycle, Restyle, Rewear 