Raloo

Raloo

Raloo

Outfit management application 

Back to the case studies

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Raloo was my project work in a Product Designer course at Moholy Nagy Art and Design University in Hungary.

The total duration of the course was 10 weeks. Our ultimate purpose was to design a mobile application with a high fidelity prototype. Our final product was a useable and visually appealing fully touchable interactive prototype.

 

ABOUT OUR TEAM

After we conceived the basic concept, we chose teammates. My partner, Nikolett was coming from a research and marketing background and I was coming from design. Our strengths were different, but the key ones to make a great user experience. We could support each other effectively, exchanging our expertises.

DEFINING THE PROBLEM 

IN THE VERY BEGINNIG WE WANTED TO DEFINE WHAT THE DIFFICULTIES WERE THAT OUR POTENTIAL USERS WERE FACING.

  • Many people are not confident enough about their style of management, and they worry about disharmonic appearance. 
  • Many Hungarian fashion designers deal with difficulties regards marketing and promotional issues.

How could we solve these problems with a digital product?

We considered that the best solution might be a mobile application, that connects fashion designers to their potential customers and provides information about them and their products. It would be built around a key feature, which would serve the requirements of fashion managements. We wanted to add some fun features to it, so we made a tinder-like card swiper outfit creator, which can drop random recommendations if the user taps on the magical Raloo triangle.

FRAMEWORK

Human Centerd Design

The reason why we chose the HCD framework is because we wanted to involve the human perspective during the whole process. We really like the approach that certain problems can only be solved based on the user’s point of view instead of our assumptions.

RESEARCH

Interviews

We made several interviews with our users’ base, which we devided into two parts. 

  • Fashion Designers
  • People with “What should I wear” sort of uncertainities

Drawing information from interviews through data organization

We categorized every output data bit recorded in the interviews, based on their similarities. The result was well-structured categories of information.

Design Workshops

  •  We processed most of the information units we had, and based on this, we built up our journey maps. It represented the context of how our customers would use the product which we were designing.
  •  We specified personas. It was really important to know how our potential users would look like, and what their individual motivations could be.
  • We designed possible features for the product. The basic principle we applied was designing as many features as we were capable of, and we sorted them out afterwards.

 

WIREFRAMES

Software

We used Axure to make wireframes. We went through many different iteractions until we figured out which features could be used, and which we should put on the shelf. We had built wireframes guided by our evaluated research material, however we did some extra interviews during the progress as well, whenever we found something was unclear.

MVP

In the beginning we wanted to design an e-commerce platform. Because of our time (as the primary resource) was limited, we focused on working on the minimal viable product. We reduced the commercial functions, and we kept the core ones. What was left was:

 

  • Outfit creator based on a random recommendation function
  • Extendable magazine about designer profiles and product portfolios 
  • Self-side item digitalization / prepared file upload, organization, with outfit creation functions

USER INTERFACE

Brand identity / Design principles

We tried out many different ways until finally we could define our guidelines, that were composed by the following properties:

  • Gradient color usage on specified elements
  • Matt black interface elements with white texts and icons
  • Purple action colors, in two shades for the sake of contrast balance
  • Function-oriented typography

USABILITY TEST

LOW FIDELITY PROTOTYPING

When we were finished with wireframes and the first UI release, we built a low fidelity prototype to track the usability of our design work. The software we chose was InVision.

The random button was placed wrong

We had many issues with placing the randomizer button within the “Random Look” tab. In the beginning it was in the center of the screen, which was inconvenient to interact with, so finally we placed it down to the right of the bottom corner, as a floating button. Unfortunately it is an Android standard, nonetheless we did not find it looking inadequate. 

​​​​​​​

PROTOTYPING

High fidelity prototype for presentation

We recognised several minor mistakes applying usability tests. After we fixed them, we finished the design process by making a high fidelity prototype, to present the application we had been working on for the previous 10 weeks. We used Principle, my personal favorite prototyping tool.

Check the prototype video out. 

PRESENTATION AT PREZI HQ 

At the end of the course we presented our product at the headquarter of Prezi, in the heart of Budapest.
We received a great deal of positive feedback at the end. We assessed comments together with Niki.

Since then I changed a few steps in my methodology making my workflow more effective.