Doornation
According to the EPA as of 2018 nearly 17 million tons of textile were created. Of that only 2.5 million tons is recycled, about 15%. Granted some textiles are destroyed, but oftentimes they end up in landfills when they may have been eligible for recycling. Many people we surveyed and interviewed felt that they would be more willing to recycle and donate clothes if it was a more convenient process.
Goals:
Our goal for this project was to create a website where users could easily donate clothes. The final idea we came up with was a donation pickup service. This allowed users to pack up their clothes and have them out of their house or car and donated within a day.
When we initially started this project we had a different idea to add a gamification aspect to people’s normal donation process as well as educate on ways to recycle clothing, but soon realized this would not keep people using our website since we were not adding value and a service to their experience.
Research:
During the research phase we conducted surveys, interviews and user testing. Through this we found that those who donated donated to the most convenient place, but would be willing to travel if they knew an organization was in need. Many said the current donation process was too time consuming, and hours didn’t always line up with their schedule.
Most of the users we used to conduct our user research were within our demographic, but the outliers offered many great insights to make our website more user friendly to all users of any age or background.
The information we gathered led us to create our persona. Our persona is a person who wanted to donate clothes and help educate people on donation options available.
When it came to creating our user story map this is where we realized we needed to offer more than just educational resources on our site to get users to continue to use our site and move past the home page.
Design:
In the design phase we went through many variations of wireframing. Some of the most common issues we found when testing was that users found our site to be very text heavy and not easy to scan. Some of the most insightful information came from users outside of our demographic, but this led us to create a site that was user friendly to all ages and technology skill level.
If we had more time we would like to have expanded our options to businesses for recycling uniforms and other textiles, as well as better explain to users how we dispose or recycle the plastic bags they use to donate their clothes.
In our final prototype we added information like a FAQ page and gave background information on our company. This made our site look more credible and a place where users could learn more about our company and how we are trying to reduce clothing waste.
Check out this video of the Doornation prototype now!