Stitchio

Whether you are looking to create a garment from scratch or just sew on a missing button, sewing remains a very useful skill to have. Learning how to sew, however, can be an intimidating and frustrating experience—whether you’re a complete newbie learning to stitch or an expert teaching yourself a new technique. To make learning how to sew more accessible, we created an app to help guide sewers through the process and provide the resources for a holistic engagement with the craft.

Guide

Wentin Zhang

My Role

Secondary and Market Research
Documenting community needs and ask
Defining use case & scenario
Branding and Visual Design
Low and high fidelity wireframes
Concept development
Prototyping and usability testing
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Team

Awanee Joshi, Hillary Soletic

Research

According to Vogue Business, young people are increasingly interested in customizing, up-cycling and reconstructing clothes amid Covid-19, as shown by a spike in up-cycling, resale and increased consumption of DIY clothing supplies.

of consumers planned to spend less on clothes in 2020.

The diagram to the right depicts a steady increase in American searching for "sewing classes near me," according to Google Trends.

User Journey Map

To understand and document the problem areas and opportunities we mapped Annie's Journey before, during and after a sewing experience

Problems and Opportunities

Machine Set-up
Difficult to remember machine set up and trouble shooting issues

Learning & Practice
Feeling lost about learning and practicing techniques and processes

Material Exploration‍
Finding affordable and suitable materials for projects

Discovery & Inspiration
Discovering new techniques, patterns and finding inspiration

Wireframes and User-flows

Based on our opportunity areas we started by creating user-flows for community, courses, library and machine set-up.
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User Testing

After creating a quick prototype we tested our concept with two users to validate our navigation tab, test the onboarding flow and find any missed edge case scenarios. We got the following feedback -‍

The beginner, intermediate and advanced sewing levels need to be more clearly defined during the onboarding
Library tab in navigation is too vague; leaving users unsure of what they would find there
For machine set up there are too many different types of machine. It would be easier to focus on set up in terms of settings for different fabric types.
Add a category for notions which would include tools in the libraries page.
Need for differentiation between: doing a project and learning a technique - 2 different tasks

Visual Design

The visual design communicates the brand's personality of being approachable yet elegant with vintage underpinnings.
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REFlection

Way Forward

Test updated prototypes with each type of 4 types of sewers (currently only have feedback from bookends: Complete Newbie & Expert)
Build out Community Profiles and how users understand and interact with them
Test new “Dictionary” tab; does new verbiage make sense? Build out screen showing the description of a given material
Observe Machine Set-up Check with 4 sewer types; validate if it’s necessary or if other sewing pointers would be more helpful

Thanks for stopping by!

Find something you like? Contact me at awaneemjoshi@gmail.com

Stitchio

Guide

My Role

Team

Research

User Persona

User Journey Map

Problems and Opportunities

Wireframes and User-flows

User Testing

Visual Design

Customized Content

Community Connections

Explore your options

Set-up check

Learn and practice

Way Forward

Thanks for stopping by!