ios mobile
ThriftMate
An app to digitize the austin thrifting scene
My role
Creating lofi + hifi prototypes
Designing stakeholder presentations
Thriftstore admin testing
Time
4 months
Deliverables
Competitive analysis report
Admin view mobile prototype
Consumer view mobile prototype
Business model presentation
Team
Vaishnavi, Paola, Yiwei, Elina
Low on time? Jump to the spoilers you care about
Our target users are at the core of each segment of this story
primary insight
62% of Gen Z and millennial consumers said they look for items secondhand before buying new.
(brand new clothes in this economy? pishhposh!)
*according to threadUp's annual report
how might we
… simplify the buying and selling of second-hand clothing to make avoiding fast fashion more affordable and accessible for everyone?
we refined this problem statement through extensive background research
we talked to 45 shoppers – mix of students and young professionals
we talked to 5 different chains of Thrift Stores
so, who else is solving this?
hint: there are so many but each have their vulnerabilities
We talked to a PM from Amazon Fashion who happens to be a power user of Poshmark!
She helped our ideation process by validating our ideas
admin vs consumer
We kept thinking why has no one in Austin done this before? So we went to talk to the staff at Thrift Stores
We made 100s of sketches to visualize the consumer + thrift store side of the app's visual design
Some sketches everyone did
We decided to create user types – admin and consumer
and identified some of their key functions
Based on the staffing and pricing strategies we came up with a flow to support admin features too
not representative of the final flow but just to act as a reference point for our mid-fis
A function map to understand the main actions we want them to perform using the app
this is how we visualized the function map
We took these LoFis back to our initial interviewees
Here are a few of our main ideas for the consumer end
Consumer-grade admin view to address the overlap between thrift store staff and customers
Initial lofis with ideas for both consumer and admin views
We started to piece together a Hi-Fidelity version of these wireframes for the final pitch
Using the iOS 17 UI design kit
Iteration #1
Iteration #2
thanks for skimming all the way to the end — here are some outcomes and learnings!
outcomes
learnings
I learned that our background research and competitive analysis helped us understand how the unit economics of selling offline vs online work
I have now learned how to design an admin product on mobile
I got to talked to some amazing design experts along the way and a few product/startup people as well to help us determine the business model.