Zakoopi
Custom tailored wear on the go!
Creating experience for people to find custom-wear designers across the city
My Role
User Research, Interaction Design
Team
1 Interaction Designer
(Freelance Project)
Duration
6 weeks
PROBLEM SPACE
Context and Opportunity
The Indian apparel retail market is undergoing a massive digital shift. While e-commerce offers convenience, it lacks the tactile experience and personalization of local boutiques and bespoke designers. However, local retailers struggle to compete with the "one-click" ease of global online giants, often failing to reach or retain customers in a fragmented physical market.
Zakoopi was envisioned as a hyper-local discovery platform designed to bridge this Online-to-Offline (O2O) gap, empowering Indian apparel retailers with intelligent marketing while offering consumers a trusted way to discover local fashion.
Design Challenge
Retailers are finding it increasingly difficult to acquire and retain customers in an era of digital distraction. For the consumer, finding a high-quality local designer, boutique, or tailor is often a matter of trial and error or word-of-mouth, which is not scalable.
The core UX objective was to:
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Centralize a fragmented database of designers and tailors into a searchable, user-friendly interface.
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Build trust through social proof by integrating a community-driven rating and review system.
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Create a seamless discovery-to-visit flow that works across both web and mobile platforms.
The primary objective was to design a web application specifically for users in need of customized and tailored wear. The challenge lay in creating a platform that not only catalogs designers but also serves as a social medium for fashion enthusiasts and experienced shoppers to interact directly with designers and boutique owners.
USER RESEARCH
Gorilla User Research
The foremost challenge was to identify the user groups, how they think and what are their opinion around the tailored wear. The only way to find is to talk to the real users.
To do this we (me, 2 stakeholders) prepared a set of questionnaire targeted to the users; the set of questions served two purposes, first to float it online in our friend circle and second to do user interviews. We travelled across the city(i.e., Delhi) malls and major fashion streets to get hold of users who have come for shopping. The user interviews were kept short and minimal to avoid users dis-interest in long set of question and answering session.
Within a week time we were able to cover few major locations like Sarojini Nagar market, Shahpur Jat market, Promenade mall etc. to name a few. The gist of the all the collected information gave us lot of insights to create user personas and different touch-points in the process.
User Personas
RESEARCH SYNTHESIS
Creating a overarching picture
Out of the above exercise a detailed user journey of the entire use-case was chalked out with appropriate touch-points with a hypothetical system in place for the to be web application. Emphasis was given to what information should be provided to the user and what is business viability.
User Journey Map
IDEATION & SOLUTION
Application Flow & Design
As the end product ought to be a website ideation was done based on the entire structure and flow of the application & what could be the different page of the website.
Ideation was done based on different flows for the zeroed-down user personas, the starting flow was very basic only key important actions are listed and added to the flow; the flow was fleshed out with subsequent iterations and discussions with the other 2 key stakeholders.
User Flows
Web Design - Wireframes
The information architecture was only 2 level deep to keep it very simple and ideally consist of a majorly two page templates the search results page & the shop/boutique details page.
CONCLUSION
Reflections
This was my very first project to design a web application and it was done as a freelance project while I was in the final semester during my PG at NID. The project was challenging in its own way but the research part was pretty straight forward as I was used to it during my due course of study at NID for different classroom project.
The major part was to think of a web application which was responsive as responsive web-apps were fairly a new concept at the time and there was lot of time spent in understanding how the responsive web application works.
The output was well received by the stakeholders and they wanted me to carry out the visual designs as well for the project, I was unable to so due to lack of time. The web application was launched later i.e., second half of 2013.