Background
In a team of 5, we had to create a digital solution for a problem related to fashion. Through market research and user research, we came up with DupeIt, an app aimed to help people find more affordable clothes through an online community.
Role: product design, user research, market research, UI design, branding
User Research
User Survey
Our group was assigned to create a digital solution for the topic of fashion, and our first step was to conduct research to find an existing problem within this industry. We narrowed our scope to shopping for fashion and created a survey to quickly gather data about our topic and our users. Some questions included:
- Why do you buy the clothes/fashion items you buy?
- Which fashion chains do you shop at?
- How much do you usually spend on one fashion item?
We received 100 responses for our survey, and the two questions pictured below were some that we paid special attention to. These results gave us ideas on what problem spaces we could be looking into.
- 88% of respondents said that the biggest obstacle for shopping is that the fashion items they want cost too much
- 85% of respondents consider appearance and style a very important priority when then shop for fashion items
- 66% of respondents consider the price of the fashion item to be very important
User Interviews
In addition to the survey, we also conducted 3 user interviews to gather more qualitative data on people's opinions and their experience with shopping for fashion. These questions were more in-depth and open-ended to prompt further insights. Questions that we asked included:
- Tell me about the last time you went shopping for clothes/a fashion item. Was it online or in-stores? Were you looking for anything specific? Why did you purchase that item?
- What are some obstacles that hold you back from purchasing a fashion item?
User Persona
Based on our research findings, we created a user persona to reflect our users.
Define
Many of the users we talked to faced the problem of not being able to afford the items they want. We defined our objective, which was to make fashion more available to people, no matter what their financial situation was.
Competitive Analysis
There are tons of apps already out there, so to understand what the market was like for this problem space, we conducted competitive analyses for a few existing products solving a similar problem. This was to not only inspire us in our own solution but also see what opportunities there were in the market that we could potentially fill.

Solution
After ideation through brainstorming sessions, we came up with the solution of a community-based app that helps users find very similar alternatives to expensive fashion items but at a lower price point. We decided to call it DupeIt: the term "dupe", short for duplicate, comes from the makeup world and is used to describe drugstore makeup that perform the same as a high-end brand's makeup. We wanted to create a platform for finding the equivalent of dupes but for fashion.
Wireframes and guerrilla testing
We used Balsamiq to quickly create lo-fi wireframes. With these wireframes, we conducted guerrilla testing by asking passersby in UWaterloo's SLC to go through the screens. Through this, we were able to understand how the users processed the flow, and get their input on if the UI made sense.

User flow
When designing the user flow, we focused on three use cases:
- posting an item the user wants to find dupes for
- posting a dupe the user found for someone's item
- casual browsing for items the user is interested in
If the user is starting a post to find dupes for, they would first upload a photo of the item, then indicate the price range they would like the dupes to be. DupeIt also enables tagging to let users categorize posts.
In the case that the user wants to post a dupe for an item, we've made the process easy by inserting an in-app internet browser to search for the dupe product's link. The public can all upvote or downvote dupes.
For users who are browsing, the home screen features a tile of posts, filtered by either trending, newest, or price, which allows users to quickly view dupes they are potentially interested in. Additionally, users can use the search function, which also features top tags and brands.
Prototype
Reflection
Through DupeIt, our team learned a lot about the fundamentals of creating an app product, and had tons of fun during the process! I was able to get started in designing interfaces (using Photoshop, before I discovered Sketch) and also understand the methodologies behind good design. This included doing user research, market research, and also testing our solution. This project was able to pave the way for me in my future UX projects, and I was able to refer back to many of the methods we used in making DupeIt.

The DupeIt team 😎 (left to right: Mandy Zhang, Karen Fang, Jakob Wodnicki, Naomi Ing, Noah Trotman)